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Bias, Conflict of Interest, Ignorance, and Uncertainty
Published in Ted W. Simon, Environmental Risk Assessment, 2019
These biomarkers also represent the exposome. The exposome has been defined as all environmental exposures from conception onwards, including those related to diet and lifestyle.122 The exposome also includes endogenous exposures to chemicals, as discussed in Chapter 5. Because the exposome represents these combined exposures in their entirety, it provides an unbiased agnostic assessment for evaluating the causes of disease, environmental or otherwise.123 Assessed by sampling and analysis of body fluids, the exposome represents a top-down approach to exposure, whereas measurements of chemicals in soil, air, water, and food would represent a bottom-up approach to exposure.
In Pursuit of Total Exposure Health
Published in Kirk A. Phillips, Dirk P. Yamamoto, LeeAnn Racz, Total Exposure Health, 2020
In simple terms, metabolomics looks at the unique footprint left behind after metabolism occurs and it is integral to an understanding of biological system functionality. Because of its great potential to the study of the exposome, this field is emerging as an important way of characterizing human exposures and, therefore, aiding in describing an individual’s total health. This section presents the basics of metabolomics, advances in the field and advantages of high-throughput metabolomics, and how they could benefit TEH.
Methodological challenges in spatial and contextual exposome-health studies
Published in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 2023
Hui Hu, Xiaokang Liu, Yi Zheng, Xing He, Jaime Hart, Peter James, Francine Laden, Yong Chen, Jiang Bian
The concept of the exposome was first proposed in 2005, and “encompasses all life-course environmental exposures from the prenatal period onwards, complementing the genome” (Wild, 2005, 2012). The exposome can be categorized into internal (e.g., metabolism) and external (i.e., including specific external factors such as pollutants and general external factors such as social capital) factors (Vrijheid, 2014). While a large number of exposome-health studies have been conducted over the past decade, the majority of them focused on the internal exposome. The external exposome is still a new and developing field, and very few external exposome studies have been conducted (Zheng et al., 2020). This is not surprising since exposome-health studies require well-characterized historical exposures before disease onset, as well as large sample sizes to ensure sufficient statistical power given the domain-agnostic approach often used. The internal exposome can usually be measured using biospecimens that allows researchers to retrospectively assess individuals’ exposures from long time ago; on the other hand, measurement methods for the external exposome are more heterogeneous. As shown in Figure 1, a wide variety of tools and information can be leveraged to characterize external exposome factors, such as questionnaires and surveys (e.g., self-reported physical activity and diet), smartphone-based sensors (e.g., accelerometer-based physical activity measures), personal environmental monitors (e.g., passive silicone wristband-based polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon measures), environmental specimens (e.g., house dust), and spatial and contextual information (e.g., ambient temperature) (Turner et al., 2017). However, most of these methods are not able to accurately characterize historical exposures decades ago (e.g., prior to 2000) because historical data on these exposures are scarce.
An overview of the current progress, challenges, and prospects of human biomonitoring and exposome studies
Published in Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, 2019
Mariana Zuccherato Bocato, João Paulo Bianchi Ximenez, Christian Hoffmann, Fernando Barbosa
Similar to genome-wide association studies which generated extensive data on genetic variants in different individuals to determine if any variant was associated with a trait or risk, exposure-wide association studies (EWAS) may provide information on the effects of multiple environmental exposures related to potential adverse health risks. In 2005, Dr. Christopher Wild, a cancer epidemiologist, in his article “Complementing the genome with an exposome: the outstanding challenge of environmental exposure measurement in molecular epidemiology”, proposed for the first time the term “exposome”, as the complementary environmental component to the genome, in determining the risk of a particular disease (Wild 2005). Exposome was initially defined as the set of environmental exposures of an individual throughout his lifespan (Wild 2005). By combining the concept of exposure in traditional investigations of HB to EWAS, a significant advancement and refinement in conventional exposure assessments was developed (Dennis et al. 2017). Thus, over the last few years the term “exposome” has moved from concept to reality with an improvement in definition to “cumulative measures of environmental influences and associated biological responses throughout the life of an individual, including exposures of the environment, diet, lifestyle and endogenous processes” (Johnson et al. 2017; Miller and Jones 2013; Siroux, Agier, and Slama 2016; Stiegel et al. 2017; Valdiglesias et al. 2017). As initially proposed, the exposome was intended to complement (not compete) genomic research, taking into account our current recognition of the importance of gene–environment interactions for specific diseases and the emphasis of the environment on epigenetic expression (Buck Louis and Sundaram 2012). Thus, a significant advancement in the coming decades may better define the manner in which the combination of genome and exposome contribute to assessing disease risk, based upon GWAS and EWAS approaches (Patel, Bhattacharya, and Butte 2010).