The Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource: enabling research into the environmental influences on children's health outcomes.

Purpose Of Review: The Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) is a new infrastructure supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to expand the ability of children's health researchers to include analysis of environmental exposures in their research and to incorporate the emerging concept of the exposome.

Recent Findings: There is extensive discussion of the potential of the exposome to advance understanding of the totality of environmental influences on human health. Children's health is a logical choice to demonstrate the exposome concept due to the extensive existing knowledge of individual environmental exposures affecting normal health and development and the short latency between exposures and observable phenotypes.

The Exposome: Embracing the Complexity for Discovery in Environmental Health.

Environmental exposures are ubiquitous and play a fundamental role in the development of complex human diseases. The exposome, which is defined as the totality of environmental exposures over the life course, allows for systematic evaluation of the relationship between exposures and associated biological consequences, and represents a powerful approach for discovery in environmental health research. However, implementing the exposome concept is challenged by the ability to accurately assess multiple exposures and the ability to integrate information across the exposure–disease continuum.

Mixtures research at NIEHS: an evolving program.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has a rich history in evaluating the toxicity of mixtures. The types of mixtures assessed by the Division of the National Toxicology Program (DNTP) and the extramural community (through the Division of Extramural Research and Training, DERT) have included a broad range of chemicals and toxicants, with each study having a unique set of questions and design considerations. Some examples of the types of mixtures studied include: groundwater contaminants, pesticides/fertilizers, dioxin-like chemicals (assessing the toxic equivalency approach), drug combinations, air pollution, metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, technical mixtures (e.