Health Wanted: The Exposome
HEALTH WANTED, a weekly radio show and podcast produced in partnership with WABE, brings need-to-know public health headlines and breaks down the science behind trending topics.
The Episode
The topic: The exposome is an expansive concept that encompasses everything in the environment a person is exposed to throughout their lifetime. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow and guest Doug Walker, PhD, discuss the study of the exposome, environmental exposures, and their impact on human health.
The takeaway:The exposome is the concept that everything we are exposed to throughout the entire course of our lives plays a role in our health. Environmental factors like air, food, and water; societal factors like racism and poverty; and behavioral factors like smoking or exercise all play a role in shaping one’s exposome.
- Air pollution is a significant environmental issue that affects multiple aspects of health. Increased exposure to air pollution has been linked to the early onset of menstruation, which is associated with decreased fertility and a higher risk of developing certain cancers. Exposure to traffic pollution may increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's, and early childhood exposure to air pollution may increase the likelihood of autism.
- Fires present another serious health risk. Beyond the general dangers of smoke exposure, fires can release harmful chemicals into the air when buildings containing substances like lead paint, cleaning products, and other toxins are burned. This exposure is especially dangerous for people who have pre-existing lung conditions or lung cancer.
- Throughout their lives, people are exposed to a variety of industrial chemicals, often on a daily basis. This makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint whether a specific compound is directly harmful to the body or if cumulative exposure to various chemicals is the cause of health issues.
- Socioeconomic factors further influence the exposome. Low-income neighborhoods are often located near busy roads, increasing residents' exposure to traffic pollution. These areas also tend to have more chemical factories, fewer green spaces to help filter pollution, and less political power to advocate for better environmental health protections.
The Interview
The guest: Doug Walker, PhD
The key takeaways:
- There are many different areas of “omics” research areas, including genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. All of these approaches are used to study and characterize processes in the body, helping scientists to understand how different biological systems interact and contribute to health outcomes.
- Before the rise of omic studies, it was believed that a person’s health was primarily determined by their genetic makeup. However, we now know that environmental factors play a much larger role in health outcomes. This is where the study of the exposome comes in, focusing on the environmental factors that can impact a person’s health.
- While it is impossible to measure someone’s entire exposome, scientists can identify specific signatures or biomarkers that provide insights into past exposures. For environmental exposures to cause disease or health changes, they must cause some sort of change in the body or genetic material, which researchers can identify and trace to possible environmental causes.
- Since people have control over some aspects of their environment, identifying harmful exposures can offer opportunities for the prevention of health issues. The future of exposomics aims to not only pinpoint the most dangerous exposures but to provide people with actionable information on how they can change their behavior or environment to mitigate these effects.
The Listener Questions
Is there a benefit to getting measles?
No! Yes, you can get immunity to measles from the measles virus, but that is assuming you survive getting sick and the only poor outcome you experience is temporary illness. It is also assuming you do not get any of the other worse side effects, like brain swelling or immune amnesia, which can make you more susceptible to other infections you previously were protected from.
There are 21 abstracts from papers that claim to show that measles infection is good for you. About 9 of them are case studies that all appear to show temporary suppression of symptoms of things like psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and one case of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in kids with an active measles infection.
There might be evidence that measles can temporarily suppress other diseases if a child already has them, but that’s not an argument that measles is protective of anything. Disease suppression is also not a common outcome, given all these cases were written up for the fact that it’s an atypical experience.
The two most recent papers were about the potential for genetically altered measles virus as a treatment for cancer in petri dishes. One of those experiments used tumor cells from a dog bladder that were then grown in a mouse, and the other was about using this modified virus in conjunction with another treatment, again in a petri dish. It is not anywhere near translatable to someone being infected with measles and protecting them from cancer.
There are more papers, but none of them made an argument that getting measles is truly beneficial. Most of the studies were incredibly old as well, likely because people decided it was a good idea to stop getting measles and vaccinate everyone for it.
Are there health risks involved with microplastics and PFAS in artificial turf?
This is a great question and one that’s difficult to answer because, unfortunately, forever chemicals are so pervasive in our environment, and it’s hard to tell if artificial turf has more of them or not.
Research regarding the risk of forever chemicals and turf is inconclusive in regards to what amount of potential exposure would be harmful to health.
There are a lot of different factors that can influence risk, like the amount of time spent on turf, but young kids do tend to be more vulnerable to chemical exposures.
Even though there’s more research needed to find out the quantifiable risks to health when it comes to turf, one thing we do know is that they get a lot hotter than grass. That could be a cause of injuries for kids playing on turf in the summer.
Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:
- Streaming at wabe.org or the WABE app
- Subscribing on Apple or Spotify
- Watching on WABE's YouTube channel
