Funding: Breathe in

Do passive smoking or lung infections harm the development of children's alveoli?

By the age of three, the growth and development of a child's alveoli is complete, or so it is thought. Actually tracking this growth is difficult – the tiny air-filled sacs in the lung are full of gas and invisible to imaging techniques such as X-rays.

If people inhale helium-3, however, magnetic resonance can visualise the gas and produce detailed images of a breathing lung. John Owers-Bradley (University of Nottingham) and Professor Michael Silverman (University of Leicester) have been awarded a project grant through the Physiological Sciences funding stream to use this technique to study the normal pattern of alveolar growth and development during childhood and adolescence, and the impact on this of early childhood events such as premature birth, passive smoking and lung infections.