[Esposome: from intuition to compulsory line of research in Occupational and Environmental Medical Sciences]
Abstract
As genomics aims at the collective characterization and quantification of genes, exposomics refers to the totality of lifetime environmental exposures, consisting in a novel approach to studying the role of the environment in human disease.
The aim is to assess all human environmental and occupational exposures in order to better understand their contribution to human diseases. The "omics" revolution infact mostly regards the underlying method: scientific knowledge is expected to come from the analysis of increasingly extensive databases.
The primary focus is on air pollution and water contaminants, but all the determinants of human exposure are conceptually part of the idea of exposome, including physical and psychological factors. Using 'omic' techniques the collected exposure data can be linked to biochemical and molecular changes in our body. Since the first formulation of the idea itself of Exposome many efforts have been made to translate the concept into research, in particular two important studies have been started in Europe. We herein suggest that Occupational Medicine could be a precious contributor to the growth of exposure science also in its omic side thanks to the methods and to the knowledges part of our background.
References
- 1) Wild CP. Complementing the genome with an "exposome": the outstanding challenge of environmental exposure measurement in molecular epidemiology. (2005): 1847-1850. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-05-0456
- 2) Wild CP. The exposome: from concept to utility. International journal of epidemiology 41.1 (2012): 24-32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyr236
- 3) Rappaport SM. Implications of the exposome for exposure science. Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology 21.1 (2011): 5-9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2010.50
- 4) Vineis P, Chadeau-Hyam M, Gmuender H, et al. The exposome in practice: design of the EXPOsOMICS project. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health (2016). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheh.2016.08.001
- 5) Vrijheid M, Slama R, Robinson O, et al. The human early-life exposome (HELIX): project rationale and design. Environmental health perspectives 122.6 (2014): 535-544.
- 6) Neveu V, Moussy A, Rouaix H, et al. Exposome-Explorer: a manually-curated database on biomarkers of exposure to dietary and environmental factors. Nucleic Acids Research (2016) 7) Goldfarb DS. The exposome for kidney stones. Urolithiasis 44.1 (2016): 3-7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1289/isee.2016.4731
- 8) Rogler G, Vavricka S. Exposome in IBD: recent insights in environmental factors that influence the onset and course of IBD. Inflammatory bowel diseases 21.2 (2015): 400-408. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1097/MIB.0000000000000229
- 9) Andra SS, Austin C, Arora M. The tooth exposome in children's health research. Current opinion in pediatrics 28.2 (2016): 221-227. 10) http://www.occam.it/group/index.php 11) Pirastu R, Ancona, C, lavarone I, et al. Sentieri Project. Mortality study of residents in Italian polluted sites: evaluation of the epidemiological evidence. Epidemiol Prev 34.5-6 (2010): 1-96. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1097/MOP.0000000000000327
- 12) Faisandier L, Bonneterre V, De Gaudemaris R, et al. Occupational exposome: A network-based approach for characterizing Occupational Health Problems. Journal of biomedical informatics 44.4 (2011): 545-552. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2011.02.010
- 13) Tomasetti C, Vogelstein B. Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions. Science 347.6217 (2015): 78-81. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1260825
- 14) Miller GW. Jones DP. The nature of nurture: refining the definition of the exposome. toxicological sciences (2013): kft251. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kft251
- 15) Tomasetti C, Lu L, Vogelstein B. Stem cell divisions, somatic mutations, cancer etiology, and cancer prevention. Science 355.6331 (2017): 1330-1334. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf9011
- 16) Winkler R. Popper and the Omics. Frontiers in plant science 7 (2016). 17) Feyerabend P. Against method. Verso, 1993. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2016.00195
Metrics
Citations and online attention from Dimensions, Altmetric and PlumX.
License
Copyright (c) 2017 The Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
PAGEPress has chosen to apply the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all manuscripts to be published.