Yale school of public health symposium on lifetime exposures and human health: the exposome; summary and future reflections

Abstract

The exposome is defined as “the totality of environmental exposures encountered from birth to death” and was developed to address the need for comprehensive environmental exposure assessment to better understand disease etiology. Due to the complexity of the exposome, significant efforts have been made to develop technologies for longitudinal, internal and external exposure monitoring, and bioinformatics to integrate and analyze datasets generated. Our objectives were to bring together leaders in the field of exposomics, at a recent Symposium on “Lifetime Exposures and Human Health: The Exposome,” held at Yale School of Public Health. Our aim was to highlight the most recent technological advancements for measurement of the exposome, bioinformatics development, current limitations, and future needs in environmental health. In the discussions, an emphasis was placed on moving away from a one-chemical one-health outcome model toward a new paradigm of monitoring the totality of exposures that individuals may experience over their lifetime. This is critical to better understand the underlying biological impact on human health, particularly during windows of susceptibility. Recent advancements in metabolomics and bioinformatics are driving the field forward in biomonitoring and understanding the biological impact, and the technological and logistical challenges involved in the analyses were highlighted. In conclusion, further developments and support are needed for large-scale biomonitoring and management of big data, standardization for exposure and data analyses, bioinformatics tools for co-exposure or mixture analyses, and methods for data sharing.

Beyond genomics: understanding exposotypes through metabolomics

“…This technique reduces the total number of combinations of exposures to “prevalent co-occurring combinations”; however, integration with other systems-level data still remains very complex. The additional challenges associated with integrating exposome data with metabolomics, genomics, and proteomics have been recently reviewed [ 27 ] and were also highlighted in a recent symposium report [ 113 ].…”

How Poverty Alleviation Efforts Manifest among Smallholder Groundnut Farmers in Eastern Zambia

“…Both pesticides and aflatoxins possess properties which can impact individuals both during growth and development into adulthood. This includes both pre-and post-natal exposures-an important consideration given the high reproductive rate of Zambia and the proportion of women engaged in agricultural tasks (Johnson et al, 2017). Over the lifespan of an individual, exposure to environmental toxicants poses serious economic concerns at the micro and macro level.…”

Exposomal research in the context of birth cohorts

“…Technologies such as liquid chromatographyemass spectrometry can detect more than 20,000 mass spectral features in batches of samples in approximately 2.5 minutes. 54 Significant technical advancements and their application in birth cohort studies enable researchers to generate a large and rich data set with regard to external and internal exposome.…”