Longitudinal Studies on Prenatal or Early Life Exposures, Their Associated Epigenetics, and Population Health
A special issue of Epigenomes (ISSN 2075-4655).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2025 | Viewed by 1311
Special Issue Editors
Interests: epigenetic marker detection; variable selection; clustering; gaussian direct and undirected networks
Interests: Bayesian statistics; latent variable modeling; structural equation model; genomics and epigenetics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Background: Earlier environmental exposures (e.g., mother's smoking during pregnancy, second-hand smoking, etc.), comorbidities (e.g., allergy), and substantial changes in life (e.g., adolescence) leave marks on DNA without changing the DNA sequence. Many studies have examined and demonstrated concurrent connections between epigenetics and population health. Epigenetics marks earlier exposures and thus has a potential to serve as a predictive biomarker for later life health conditions and related outcomes. Hence, assessing such associations in the context of longitudinal studies is critical and valuable in disease prediction, prevention and intervention or treatment. However, such studies, including longitudinal association studies and predictive modeling, are limited. Objective: Most epigenetic studies have been focusing on DNA methylation and will be the focus of this special issue as well, but other epigenetic mechanisms, e.g., histone modification, are welcome. Through this special issue, we aim at attracting longitudinal studies in the following areas: (1) prenatal epigenetics and postnatal health, (2) early life epigenetics and later life health conditions, and (3) epigenetics before disease treatment and response to the treatment. Longitudinal association studies for epigenetic markers or studies utilizing predictive modeling for predicting markers are strongly encouraged.
Prof. Dr. Hongmei Zhang
Dr. Yu (Joyce) Jiang
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- earlier environmental exposures
- early life epigenetic
- postnatal health
- epigenetic marker detection
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