Understanding disease through environment-wide association studies

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The disease risk for each individual is influenced by both genetic factors and their environment. Environmental factors encompass, for instance, exposures to external risk factors, like, e.g., exposure to pesticides, and behavioral exposures, like, e.g., smoking or fitness habits. For many diseases a majority of the variation in individual disease risk is thought to be due to differences in environmental factors. Furthermore unlike genetic factors, which cannot be controlled, exposure to environmental risks can be moderated providing a pathway to disease prevention, in particular for individuals with elevated genetic risk. While for some diseases major environmental risk factors have been identified, like, e.g., the link between smoking and lung cancer, most environmental factors are likely to have small effects, with many such factors jointly acting on disease risk. This project aims to develop methods and computational tools which will make it possible to identify such small to moderate environmental risk factors in large cohorts. Using over a thousand environmental factors measured in about 500,000 participants of the UK Biobank, we will apply these methods to identify factors which are associated with myocardial infarction (heart attack) and stroke, two of the leading causes of death in the UK. The results from this projects could help in developing concrete recommendations regarding environmental factors people are exposed to and their lifestyles choices such as to lower their risk of heart attacks and stroke. Identified risk factors could also provide information about pathways involved in these diseases, helping us to better understand how the disease develops. More generally, the developed of methods and tools will be widely applicable to other disease and will allow us to create better individual risk profiles allowing for better allocation of resources for disease monitoring and prevention.