New research from the University of Leicester has confirmed that children in the UK are reaching adulthood with permanently reduced lung capacity because of air pollution, placing them on a direct trajectory toward heart disease decades before their time.
The findings come from two interlinked studies produced by Leicester's Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability, examining the effect of air pollutants at every stage from pregnancy through to early adulthood. The more recent, published in Environmental Research in 2026, tracked approximately 5,200 children from the UK's Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) birth cohort, measuring their lung function at ages 8, 15, and 24 years.
