Understanding the Exposome

The Exposome concept

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The exposome concept, initially described by Christopher Paul Wild in 2005 and 2012, refers to the totality of exposures an individual is subjected to from conception throughout  theirlifetime. This can range from maternal smoking during pregnancy, certain food intake in childhood, noise at school, or parental education, to social characteristics in the neighbourhood or surrounding green spaces. The exposome concept was introduced as a complement to the genome initiative (the biological approach of improving our understanding of disease by decoding the human genome) and strives to map every exposure an individual is subjected to from conception to death, providing a DNA-like detailed level of exposure information. This introduced approach highlights the pressing need to consider the importance of both internal and external exposures for health.

Applying the exposome approach, the Equal-Life project studied multiple exposures across the life course in children and adolescents (0-21 years) in relation to mental health and cognition. These exposures include physical and social environments at different phases of a child’s development at different places where they spend time, like the home environment, neighbourhood, kindergarten, and school or the uterus for a fetus. The exposome approach provides a comprehensive framework to study the long-term effects of the multiple exposures children are exposed to, including causes and mechanisms driving social inequalities in health. Important here is also how single exposures (e.g. pollutants, social relations) add up or interact and how this affects mental health and cognitive development. Studies often fail to adopt a child’s perspective when examining exposure-response relationships in health problems. Especially in studies regarding young children, ratings will rarely be done by children themselves, therefore, they are often reflecting parents’ and teachers’ perspectives rather than a child’s perspective.