Background: Despite advances in understanding genetic susceptibility to cancer, much of cancer heritability remains unidentified. At the same time, the makeup of industrial chemicals in our environment only grows more complex. This gap in knowledge on cancer risk has prompted calls to expand cancer research to the comprehensive, discovery-based study of non-genetic environmental influences, conceptualized as the "exposome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Asthma is associated with impaired lung function; however, it is uncertain if a lower childhood lung function is associated with asthma onset and persistence during adolescence. The aims of the present study were to investigate the association between childhood lung function and onset and persistence of asthma during adolescence.
Methods: In the population-based BAMSE (Sweden), PIAMA (Netherlands) and MAAS (UK) birth cohorts, we analysed the association of forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV), forced vital capacity (FVC), FEV/FVC and forced expiratory volume at 75% of FVC at age 8 years with asthma onset and persistence in adolescence (age 12-16 years) using cohort-specific logistic regression analysis followed by meta-analysis.
Literature indicates a potential association between dairy consumption and risk of Parkinson´s disease (PD), especially among men, yet the results remain inconclusive. We investigated this association in a large prospective European cohort. Dietary and non-dietary data was collected from 183,225 participants of the EPIC-for-Neurodegenerative-Diseases (EPIC4ND) cohort, a sub-cohort of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUltrafine particles (UFP), commonly expressed as particle number concentrations (PNC), have been associated with harm to human health yet are currently not regulated or routinely monitored in many places. This has limited the potential for studies of health effects of long-term exposure to UFP. The present study aims to understand the spatial and temporal variation in façade-level UFP exposures in Copenhagen, Denmark.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe matrix effect limits the accuracy of quantitation of the otherwise popular metabolomics technique liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC-MS). The gold standard to correct for this phenomenon, whereby compounds coeluting with the analyte of interest cause ionization enhancement or suppression, is to quantify an analyte based on the peak area ratio with an isotopologue added to the sample as an internal standard. However, these stable isotopes are expensive and sometimes unavailable.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Alterations in gut microbiota are observed in Parkinson's disease (PD). Previous studies on microbiota-derived metabolites in PD were small-scale and post-diagnosis, raising concerns about reverse causality.
Objectives: Our goal was to prospectively investigate the association between plasma microbial metabolites and PD risk within a metabolomics framework.
Self-reported occupational exposure was previously associated with COPD in the Spanish population. This study aimed to analyse the relationship between occupational exposure to various chemical and biological agents, COPD, emphysema, and the bronchial wall area, which was determined by lung computed tomography (CT) in 226 individuals with COPD and 300 individuals without COPD. Lifetime occupational exposures were assessed using the ALOHA(+) job exposure matrix, and CT and spirometry were also performed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) for air pollutant mixtures are challenging because risk estimates are primarily derived from single-pollutant models. Combining risk estimates from multiple pollutants requires new approaches, as a simple addition of single pollutant risk estimates from correlated air pollutants may result in double counting. We investigated approaches applying concentration-response functions (CRFs) from single- and two-pollutant models in HIAs, focusing on long-term exposure to particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Aim: Woodsmoke from household fireplaces contributes significantly to outdoor air pollution in the Netherlands. The current understanding of the respiratory health effects of exposure to smoke from residential wood burning is limited. This study investigated the association between short-term changes in outdoor woodsmoke exposure and lung function, respiratory symptoms, and medication use in adults in the Netherlands.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Increased lung-cancer risks for low socioeconomic status (SES) groups are only partially attributable to smoking habits. Little effort has been made to investigate the persistent risks related to low SES by quantification of potential biases.
Methods: Based on 12 case-control studies, including 18 centers of the international SYNERGY project (16,550 cases, 20,147 controls), we estimated controlled direct effects (CDE) of SES on lung cancer via multiple logistic regression, adjusted for age, study center, and smoking habits, and stratified by sex.
Environ Health Perspect
September 2024
Background: Exposomics, the study of the exposome, is flourishing, but the field is not well defined. The term "exposome" refers to all environmental influences and associated biological responses throughout the lifespan. However, this definition is very similar to that of the term "environment"-the external elements and conditions that surround and affect the life and development of an organism.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Cancer
January 2025
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most lethal cancers with patients having unresectable or metastatic disease at diagnosis, with poor prognosis and very short survival. Given that genetic variation within autophagy-related genes influences autophagic flux and susceptibility to solid cancers, we decided to investigate whether 55,583 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within 234 autophagy-related genes could influence the risk of developing PDAC in three large independent cohorts of European ancestry including 12,754 PDAC cases and 324,926 controls. The meta-analysis of these populations identified, for the first time, the association of the BID variant with an increased risk of developing the disease (OR = 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnviron Sci Technol
October 2024
Socioeconomic inequalities in the exposome have been found to be complex and highly context-specific, but studies have not been conducted in large population-wide cohorts from multiple countries. This study aims to examine the external exposome, encompassing individual and environmental factors influencing health over the life course, and to perform dimension reduction to derive interpretable characterization of the external exposome for multicountry epidemiological studies. Analyzing data from over 25 million individuals across seven European countries including 12 administrative and traditional cohorts, we utilized domain-specific principal component analysis (PCA) to define the external exposome, focusing on air pollution, the built environment, and air temperature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe carcinogenicity of benzene was reevaluated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2017, with the Working Group reaffirming positive yet inconclusive associations with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). To extend our previous observation of a significant exposure-response for cumulative occupational benzene exposure and NHL risk among Chinese women in a population-based cohort in Shanghai, we extended follow-up of this cohort and pooled the data with a similarly designed population-based cohort of men in Shanghai. Cumulative exposure estimates were derived for 134,449 participants in the pooled analysis by combining ordinal job-exposure matrix intensity ratings with quantitative benzene measurements from an inspection database of Shanghai factories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: This study aimed to prospectively investigate associations of working night shifts with weight gain in the Nightingale Study, a large cohort of female nurses.
Methods: This study included 36 273 registered nurses, who completed questionnaires in 2011 and 2017. Cumulative number of nights, mean number of nights/month and consecutive number of nights/month in 2007-2011 were assessed.
Occupational exposure to particulate matter (PM) can result in multiple adverse health effects and should be minimized to protect workers' health. PM exposure at the workplace can be complex with many potential sources and fluctuations over time, making it difficult to control. Dynamic maps that visualize how PM is distributed throughout a workplace over time can help in gaining better insights into when and where exposure occurs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Lung cancer risk prediction models might efficiently identify individuals who should be offered lung cancer screening. However, their performance has not been comprehensively evaluated in Europe. We aimed to externally validate and evaluate the performance of several risk prediction models that predict lung cancer incidence or mortality in prospective European cohorts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe plasticizer di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) is known to have endocrine-disrupting properties mediated by its many metabolites that form upon exposure in biological systems. In a previous study, we reported an inverse association between DEHP metabolites in the human ovarian follicular fluid (FF) and the responsiveness of the follicles to controlled ovarian stimulation during in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. Here, we explored this association further through molecular analysis of the ovarian FF samples.
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