Environment-encompassing health
Decoding the exposome to tackle chronic disease
The exposome is a list of the totality of environmental exposures in a person’s lifetime.
As pollution, microplastics, and synthetic chemicals are increasingly shown to have long-term effects on our bodies, the exposome will become more discussed—both scientifically and culturally. Bryan Johnson and Nat Friedman have taken interest in understanding microplastics in our food supply. But the next stage is looking at all of these exposures together, rather than in isolation.
By studying the exposome, researchers can better understand the complex interplay between multiple exposures and the development of chronic diseases. Measurement spans across biological layers: genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and adductomics (which measures chemical adducts bound to DNA and proteins). High-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) is a crucial tool for acquiring data on the small molecule chemical exposome.
Though it’s higher touch, in the future, people might wear sensors to measure real-time exposures such as air quality, noise levels, UV exposure, and physical activity. These data streams can feed into Exposome-Wide Association Studies (ExWAS), which systematically model relationships between phenotypes and multiple exposures—similar to how GWAS links genetics and disease.
National biobanks are starting to incorporate exposome studies, but with varying degrees of comprehensiveness. A more integrated approach could be especially useful for understanding complex, hard-to-diagnose chronic diseases:
Ultimately, the exposome provides a framework to decode how the environment shapes health across a lifetime—revealing signals that traditional genomics alone can’t fully explain.
