About our Lab

Greetings

　Welcome to our website.
Our laboratory focuses on explaining responses to large-scale disasters, designing new measures to improve life-course health, and enhancing the understanding on multifactorial diseases. Our aim is to make this website accessible and useful to all users.

To prospective graduate school students: To achieve our mission, we have designed a three-generational cohort study (the BirTree Cohort Study, the first of its kind globally), which is currently ongoing. We are continuously analyzing the data obtained from this study to derive new findings for benefiting society. This is a pioneering study in this field. It does present certain challenges, but it has great potential and has provided the opportunity to expand knowledge.

To researchers: The BirTree cohort is a biobank. We would be delighted if you were to utilize the samples and information. The data structure is complicated because the design of the cohort encompasses births and three generations. One needs to understand the complexity thereof to utilize it. However, if you are involved in joint studies, please feel free to share your views on the data structure. Contact us for details on using the biobank.

To Japanese nationals: We are aware of your expectations from medical research. Accordingly, we are working hard to win the battle against diseases. Although the cohort study takes a significant amount of time and requires a large budget, it has the potential to achieve results far exceeding the limits of imagination; the results we have obtained to date are testament. The potential is higher: Once the cohort study is updated to a genome cohort study, the findings would help us develop medical care tailored to each person’s individual condition. We are constantly working to produce timely results to benefit society. Thank you for your continued support.

Professor of Disaster Public Health and Molecular Epidemiology
Shinichi Kuriyama

Mission

Our lab has three missions.

The first is to apply public health methods to spread awareness on how to respond to large-scale disasters.
What can we do before a major disaster, in its immediate aftermath, and in the medium to long term afterward? We are devising various systematic measures that can be implemented across the entire disaster period, from the immediate aftermath of a disaster to the quasi-emergency period. These efforts include the development of float packs that could save people’s lives during tsunamis, improvement of hygiene, and provision of pharmaceuticals. We plan to use the cohort study method to understand the medium- and long-term health impacts of disasters on victims. We will then use this understanding to find solutions to related problems. However, what can be done before a major disaster occurs? The answer could play an enormous role in public health. The reasons people did not immediately evacuate when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck have become a major topic of discussion. People tend not to act unless they perceive an immediate risk. Many public health studies have made healthy people aware of future risk, encouraging them to quit smoking, reduce salt intake, or adopt other precautionary measures on time. This method could also be applied to disaster-related public health, enabling people to feel the risks of a disaster before it occurs. This would drive them to undertake necessary preparations during non-emergency periods and to take prompt and appropriate action immediately after a disaster.

Our second mission is to apply life-course epidemiology methods to formulate health improvement throughout all stages of life and realize very early stage intervention in life. It is well known that many diseases that appear during middle and old age are not only caused by lifestyles, but also by genetic and environmental factors during the fetal period and infancy. This is the perspective adopted by life course epidemiology; an example is the Developmental Origin of Health and Disease (DOHaD). Life course epidemiology identifies and implements effective health improvement measures in each period of an individual’s life from the fetal period onwards rather than in middle or old age, when the effects of lifestyle habits and other environmental factors have accumulated over many years. The Birth and Three-Generation Cohort Study is the first research design of its kind and serves as the foundation of our research. We hope the findings obtained from this cohort will help explain the factors that affect the health of all members of a family, starting with children.

Our third mission is to apply molecular epidemiological methods to better understand the pathophysiology of multifactorial diseases, including autism spectrum disorders.
Molecular epidemiology is a new interdisciplinary field of epidemiology in which genomic medicine and artificial intelligence technologies are integrated. We aim to unravel the interaction between genetics and the environment by utilizing genomic and omics information and conducting artificial intelligence analysis technologies while applying epidemiological methods. Our goal is to apply these molecular epidemiological methods to recover missing heritability and to overcome multifactorial diseases, which have been a challenge for the world for many years. One disease concept may in fact be composed of many subgroups, each of which could have their own diverse cause and therapeutic effects. Therefore, multifactorial diseases may actually be multi-disease diseases.

Research Overview

Disaster Public Health

We have conducted large-scale epidemiological surveys to examine the medium- and long-term effects of major disasters on health. There are concerns that earthquakes might have a major impact on the physical and mental health of children and adults in the medium and long terms. While we must keep deriving important findings, we do not want to leave unaddressed the root causes of problems, such as the rise in illnesses. We monitor health conditions in the medium and long term after major disasters and conduct intervention studies in accordance with the results to ensure that root causes of problems are not left unaddressed. We mainly focus on three types of research:

1. Research on child health in areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake.
   We ascertain the development status of children in areas affected by the earthquake to clarify its impact on children’s development. We analyze nursery school data and data on infant health check-ups to assess children’s growth as they age.
2. Research on the association between mold and mite outbreaks in temporary housing and allergy symptoms.
   We investigate the association between the conditions of mold and mite outbreaks in temporary housing and examine related allergy symptoms, particularly for infants, in Ishinomaki City.
3. Research on minimizing damage to health due to hypothetical major disasters.
   We utilize the lessons from the Great East Japan Earthquake to explore how health damage caused by the next hypothetical major disaster can be minimized.

Molecular Epidemiology & Life-Course Epidemiology

We are currently conducting the Birth and Three-Generation Cohort Study with a pioneer research design. Our goals are to clarify the impact of a disaster on children’s health and to elucidate the root causes and develop new treatment for the illnesses that adversely affect children.
The field of medicine is shifting away from its previous approach of providing uniform treatment by considering people’s individual conditions, becoming more tailored to cater to individuals. This trend is called precision medicine or personalized healthcare and medicine, which has become a major pillar of modern medicine. In molecular epidemiology, we conduct large-scale molecular epidemiological surveys to deliver precision medicine and to clarify the impact of large-scale disasters on health.

1. Research on genome cohort methodologies to realize precision medicine
   We are developing the Birth and Three-Generation Cohort Study with　a pioneer research design of cohort research, which has progressed to a patient cohort, population cohort, and birth cohort. Our aim is to understand the link between genetic factors, environmental factors (from the fetal stage), and diseases to realize disease prevention and preemptive medicine. We are also intend to develop new treatment methods for the relevant diseases using the findings.
2. Research to elucidate the causes of neurological diseases, particularly those relating to autism spectrum disorders
   We are addressing on elucidating the causes of and developing new treatment methods for autism spectrum disorders. In particular, we have found that some children with an autism spectrum disorder respond to vitamin B6. We then use this responsiveness to clarify the causes of this condition.
3. A molecular epidemiological study of lifestyle-related diseases, particularly obesity and cancer
   We are using a life course survey and genome cohort study to clarify the causes of and to develop treatment methods for lifestyle-related diseases, particularly obesity and cancer.

Access