Abstract

Background:

In June 2020, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a virtual workshop focused on integrating the science of aging and environmental health research. The concurrent COVID-19 pandemic and national attention on racism exposed shortcomings in the environmental research field’s conceptualization and methodological use of race, which have subsequently hindered the ability of research to address racial health disparities. By the workshop’s conclusion, the authors deduced that the utility of environmental aging biomarkers—aging biomarkers shown to be specifically influenced by environmental exposures—would be greatly diminished if these biomarkers are developed absent of considerations of broader societal factors—like structural racism—that impinge on racial health equity.

Objectives:

The authors reached a post-workshop consensus recommendation: To advance racial health equity, a “compound” exposome approach should be widely adopted in environmental aging biomarker research. We present this recommendation here.

Discussion:

The authors believe that without explicit considerations of racial health equity, people in most need of the benefits afforded by a better understanding of the relationships between exposures and aging will be the least likely to receive them because biomarkers may not encompass cumulative impacts from their unique social and environmental stressors. Employing an exposome approach that allows for more comprehensive exposure–disease pathway characterization across broad domains, including the social exposome and neighborhood factors, is the first step. Exposome-centered study designs must then be supported with efforts aimed at increasing the recruitment and retention of racially diverse study populations and researchers and further “compounded” with strategies directed at improving the use and interpretation of race throughout the publication and dissemination process. This compound exposome approach maximizes the ability of our science to identify environmental aging biomarkers that explicate racial disparities in health and best positions the environmental research community to contribute to the elimination of racial health disparities. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP8392

中文翻译：

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在环境老化生物标志物研究中采用“复合”暴露组方法：呼吁采取行动促进种族健康公平

摘要

背景：

2020 年 6 月，美国国家科学院、工程院和医学院主办了一次虚拟研讨会，重点讨论如何整合衰老科学和环境健康研究。同时发生的COVID-19大流行和全国对种族主义的关注暴露了环境研究领域对种族的概念化和方法论使用的缺陷，这随后阻碍了解决种族健康差异的研究能力。根据研讨会的结论，作者推断，如果在开发这些生物标志物时没有考虑更广泛的社会因素（例如结构性种族主义），那么环境老化生物标志物（显示出特别受环境暴露影响的老化生物标志物）的效用将会大大降低。关于种族健康公平。

目标：

作者在研讨会后达成了共识建议：为了促进种族健康公平，在环境老化生物标志物研究中应广泛采用“复合”暴露组方法。我们在此提出此建议。

讨论：

作者认为，如果没有明确考虑种族健康公平，最需要通过更好地了解暴露与衰老之间的关系所提供的好处的人将最不可能获得这些好处，因为生物标志物可能不包含其独特的社会影响的累积影响。和环境压力源。第一步是采用暴露组方法，该方法可以跨广泛领域（包括社会暴露组和邻里因素）进行更全面的暴露-疾病途径表征。然后，必须通过旨在增加种族多样化研究人群和研究人员的招募和保留的努力来支持以暴露组为中心的研究设计，并进一步“复合”旨在改善整个出版和传播过程中种族的使用和解释的策略。这种复合暴露组方法最大限度地提高了我们的科学识别环境衰老生物标志物的能力，这些生物标志物解释了健康方面的种族差异，并使环境研究界为消除种族健康差异做出了最佳贡献。https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP8392