Title : Exposome for precision medicine
Abstract:
The weather has been thought to influence health for millennia: Hippocrates in his work “On airs, waters and places”, explicitly described potential pathologies related to microclimatic and climatic variations. Christopher Wild coined the term “exposome” in 2005, stating: “There is a desperate need to develop methods with the same precision for an individual's environmental exposure as we have for an individual's genome. I would like to suggest that there is need for an “exposome “to match the “genome.” Precision medicine has acknowledged the need of detecting and integrating individual-level environmental, clinical, and genetic data to achieve a better understanding of multifactorial diseases and for developing new preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic solutions adapted to groups of individuals with similar risk factors. To this end, the holistic view of human health integrates the contribution of lifestyle, behavior, socioeconomic status, and the impact of physical, chemical, microbial, viral, etc,. exposures to human health. Exposomics, thus, have become the environmental health -omics, and includes not only the extrinsic contributory factors, but also the intrinsic mechanisms involved in the body’s responses to these factors. We, hereby, add to the above factors the biological clocks and the chronomes involving cosmic influences, as well as the infodemics (by highlighting the way information perceptions influence emotions, cognition, behavior, and health). The man-made electromagnetic exposure involvement will also be presented and we will analyze their influence on body homeostasis. The open gaps in current methodology, ongoing research targets and knowledge will be identified. This perspective is novel and integrates multilevel scientific specialties for advancing the art of prognosis, diagnosis, treatment and public health understanding and measures. Finally, the understanding and management of chronic diseases might profit from the knowledge to be discovered by such a broad multifactorial approach.