Exposome researchers push to map environmental exposures for personalized medicine
Scientists studying the 'exposome'—the sum of environmental and lifestyle exposures a person accumulates—are developing tools to measure chemical, pollutant, dietary and infectious exposures alongside genetic data. The concept, coined by epidemiologist Christopher Wild in 2005, aims to quantify environmental risk factors with the same precision now possible for genomics. Researchers note that environmental exposures account for an estimated 70-90% of chronic disease risk.