Environmental Exposure, Biomonitoring and Exposure Assessment

Dear Colleagues,

It is well-established that environmental exposures play an important role in the development of diseases such as cancer. However, individuals are exposed to complex mixtures of substances (e.g., chemicals, pollution, and diet) that change throughout a person’s life. Therefore, measuring these different exposures and investigating their association with disease is complicated, though necessary, as it forms the basis of individual risk assessment of the variety of environmental exposures. Biomonitoring, which is the quantitative measurement of environmental chemicals/pollutants in the human body, is used to evaluate an individual’s exposure. The appropriate utilization of biomonitoring provides information on occupational as well as non-occupational exposures. When the chemicals of interest are unknown, untargeted approaches, such as metabolomics, are used to generate semiquantitative measurements of internal exposures. These are complemented with environmental monitoring—performing external exposure measurements from lifestyle and unavoidable exposures which are mapped and quantified by wearable sensors and environmental samples. These techniques help identify unintentional and unexpected exposures, which are difficult to tease out using more conventional techniques such as exposure questionnaires. Once obtained, exposure data are compared to animal/human data to determine an individual’s risk of disease, are used to evaluate the effectiveness of policy actions, and are used to detect emerging contaminants. In this Topic, we invite authors to submit high-quality original research, reviews, short communications, and commentaries highlighighting research on the intersection between environmental exposures, biomonitoring, and the assessment of health risks.

Dr. Maaike van Gerwen
Prof. Dr. Roel Vermeulen
Dr. Lauren Petrick
Topic Editors