Feasibility of Linking the Occupational Exposome to Alzheimer's Disease Neuropathology

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The occupational exposome encompasses all occupational exposures occurring over the life course that affect health. How Alzheimer's disease (AD) biological processes, such as AD neuropathology, are impacted by the occupational exposome is limited. Evidence suggests work and one's working life is linked to structural brain changes and poorer health and health disparities. Yet capturing the occupational exposome has been technically challenging, leading to few practical approaches within health disparity and AD research. But methodological advancements are possible. Lifecourse public data tracing methods holds promise as a novel way to quantify the occupational exposome, creating “new” historic databases in the process that are linkable to AD biobanks. Such methods are typically reserved for genealogical research and are underutilized in connecting social determinants to study health disparities. These methods involve systematically searching publicly available historical records and extracting information across one's life including US Census records, city directories, military records, death records, and newspapers sources. Never before has the occupational exposome been linked in this way to brain tissue and related neuropathology—the `gold standard' for diagnosing AD. Establishing a feasible way to link the occupational exposome to AD biological outcomes may unlock new widows in understanding the drivers of this incurable disease; providing insight into dosage and timing, and uncovering the key mediating and moderating factors involved. Yet the groundwork to uncover these mechanistic underpinnings is underdeveloped. The present proposal is an initial step towards understanding how working conditions and contexts over the life course impact AD brain health. We propose to study the feasibility of capturing occupational histories using lifecourse public data tracing methods, crosswalk to established high stress job characteristic exposures in the Occupational Information Network database (O*NET), and append these exposures to our existing multi-ADRC brain bank sample to explore associations with AD neuropathology. The overarching hypothesis is that public data tracing methods can be used to reliably construct valid occupational histories, and be linked to occupational exposures to study the role of work in AD brain health disparities.