Exposures in the City: Looking for Socioeconomic Patterns for the Urban Exposome

摘要

The outdoor urban environment has unique conditions compared with other settings: It is typically louder, with higher levels of air pollution and fewer green spaces, for instance. But urban exposures and associated risks are not spread equally within and between cities, and they may be determined by a family’s social or economic position. A recent study in Environmental Health Perspectives evaluates how socioeconomic status may affect the urban exposome—the sum total of the exposures experienced in a city’s context—among pregnant women in six European countries.The term “exposome” was coined in 2005 by researcher Christopher Wild, who defined it as the totality of life-course environmental exposures, including lifestyle factors, from the prenatal period on. The exposome concept is relatively new, and several approaches have been proposed to assess it. The concept was intended to stimulate more comprehensive exposure assessment in epidemiological studies and investment in the development of novel exposure assessment tools and approaches. These included “omics” approaches.A new paper illustrates how risk factors and predictors of environmental exposures vary among different countries and cities. For example, the association between lower socioeconomic status and higher air pollution that is reported fairly consistently in the United States is flipped in some European locations, where exposures are higher among wealthier groups. Image: © LeoPatrizi/iStockphoto.