The exposome: A new paradigm in public health research

Exposome is a new concept in area of environmental studies. Most health and disease conditions are complex, to embrace the complexity of human exposures across time and how this can be reflected in their health, exposome has been suggested as a novel tool. Exposome involves the totality of external exposure in terms of pollution, psychological stressors, diet, lifestyle, noise, conflicts,... in brief, everything across life and linking that to internal responses in term of biological changes on genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics level and how this can lead to disease development or support healthy outcomes.
Although the term of “exposome” could entail the study of the environment in the form of external environmental pollutants, this is not true. In fact, the exposome approach is a new understanding of how the environment can interact with body’s biological processes. So, rather than studying individual or various external agents and their impact on health outcomes, in the exposome we correlate these diverse external exposures to several changes on molecular levels. That is to say that in exposome, we have two major internal components to be studied alongside the totality of exposures, namely internal dose and internal response