Intego Environment

The Intego Environment Project, or in full: Intego Environment-Related Diseases Project, has the general goal of analyzing the impact of environmental factors on health.

To make this possible, the first step was to expand the Intego network to achieve better coverage. Then, in collaboration with VITO and with support from the Flemish Department of Care, a data stream was developed between 2017 and 2020. This stream enables the collection of environmental exposure data for the majority of patients in the Intego database, based on their home address.

The environmental factors in our linked dataset are obtained through collaboration with teams from VITO, VMM, and IRCEL. These factors include air pollution (fine particles, soot, ozone, etc.), noise pollution, temperature data, and information such as distance to major roads and green spaces. These data are linked at the individual patient level to their medical records, allowing us to investigate the potential influence of environmental factors on the occurrence and severity of medical conditions.

In this project, we focus on:

• Studying and visualizing known relationships between environmental factors and groups of diseases.
• Exploring potential new relationships using the dataset.
• Using the Intego Environment dataset as a basis to map the impact of environmental factors—and changes in these factors due to climate change—for Flemish policy.

We collaborate with VITO, the Censtat team at UHasselt, and the Flemish Department of Care and its partner organizations. The project is funded through a cooperation agreement with the Flemish Department of Care and additional funding from an FWO research project.

Specific focus areas for 2024:

• Developing models to map the relationship between air pollution and respiratory and cardiac diseases (Arne Janssens in collaboration with the Censtat Team, especially Elisa Duarte)
• Studying meaningful scenarios in cases of suspected local pollution (Pieter Jansens)
• Investigating the possible influence of green spaces on the occurrence of mental disorders (Simon Beerten)
• Analyzing the effects of heat on health and regional differences in these heat effects in Flanders (Endale Alemajehu)