ADAPT

The first step in asthma control is to decrease exposure to triggers. Children with asthma are more sensitive to air pollution than other children because air pollution can trigger an asthma attack. But there is no safe level of air pollution for any child to breathe. Canadian children spend most of their time indoors, but all our publicly available information is about outdoor air pollution. Identifying and controlling triggers can be challenging. It is critical that children have equitable access to clean indoor air. For that to happen, we need to understand what makes up indoor air pollution, how it affects children and how to clean indoor air. An important gap in our understanding of air pollution exposure is the relationship between what children are exposed to, which of the chemicals they breathe in and absorb, how children metabolize those chemicals and whether this results in inflammation and worse lung function. 

We know that some household chemicals and scents are hard on children with asthma, but there are more than 50,000 unregulated chemicals in household products and most of them have never been tested for their health effects. We also know that indoor air cleaning with a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter can improve asthma control in some people. But we don't understand which chemicals children breathe in or how changing them could help children's bodies get better. 

Climate change and wildfire smoke is making outdoor air worse than ever. We need low-cost interventions that improve children's lung health. Understanding what contributes to indoor air pollution will help people make their own evidence-informed decisions on what to avoid. For exposures that are important to a family, using an air filter to protect their children may be a more acceptable alternative, but air filters can be expensive, so knowledge is a great first line of defense. 

This study aims to measure indoor and outdoor air pollution, how much of those chemicals children take up from their environment, what the body does with those chemicals (metabolism), whether they cause harm (like inflammation), and what that does to lung health, sleep and general health. This information will help children and families make informed decisions on how to protect their health with cleaner indoor air