understanding of environmental causes of disease: the concept of clinical vulnerability

[Guest guest]

Oh my Gosh!!!   Someone is actually looking at the environmental cause of

decease's.  

 Hallelujah !!

The impact of new research

technologies on our understanding of environmental causes of disease: the

concept of clinical vulnerability

http://www.ehjourna l.net/content/ 8/1/54/abstract

Paolo Vineis , Aneire E Khan , Jelle Vlaanderen  and Roel Vermeulen

Environmental Health 2009,

8:54doi:10.1186/ 1476-069X- 8-54

Published:30 November 2009

Abstract

(provisional)

In spite of decades of epidemiological research, the etiology

and causal patterns for many common diseases, such as breast and colon cancer or

neurodegenerative diseases, are still largely unknown. Such chronic diseases are

likely to have an environmental origin. However, " environmental " risks have been

often elusive in epidemiological studies. This is a conundrum for current

epidemiological research. On the other side, the relative contribution of genes

to chronic diseases, as emerging from genome-wide association studies (GWAS),

seems to be modest (15-50% increase in disease risk). What is yet to be explored

extensively is a model of disease based on long-term effects of low doses of

environmental exposures, incorporating both genetic and acquired susceptibility

( " clinical vulnerability " ), and the cumulative effects of different exposures.

Such a disease model would be compatible with the weak associations found by

GWAS and the still elusive role of many (low-level) environmental exposures. The

introduction of " -omic " high-throughput technologies, such as transcriptomics,

proteomics and metabolomics, may provide, in the next years, powerful tools to

investigate early effects of environmental exposures and understand the etiology

of common diseases better, according to the " clinical vulnerability model " . The

development of " -omics " , in spite of current limitations and lack of sound

validation, could greatly contribute to the elucidation of the disease model we

propose.