Household Income as a Driver of the Early Life Exposome
Milena Maule, Cancer Epidemiology Unit, University of Turin and AOU Città della Salute e della Scienza, CPO-Piemonte
Wednesday, June 7th 2023; 9:00 am-10:00am

Abstract: The human exposome provides a representation of the multitude of exposures from different sources that we encounter throughout our lives, which begin before birth and gradually accumulate over time. Much effort has been made to study the relationship between the exposome and adverse outcomes, while much less is known about its main drivers. These may help to identify population subgroups with unfavourable exposures on which to plan interventions. We used and compared three different approaches to study socioeconomic position (SEP) as a driver of the early-life exposome in Turin children of the NINFEA cohort (Italy).  Forty-two environmental exposures, collected at 18 months of age (N = 1989), were classified in 5 groups (lifestyle, diet, meteoclimatic, traffic-related, built environment). We performed cluster analysis to identify subjects sharing similar exposures, and intra- exposome-group Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce dimensionality. The SEP- exposome association was assessed using: 1) an Exposome Wide Association Study (ExWAS), a one-exposure (SEP) one-outcome (exposome) approach; 2) multinomial regression of cluster membership on SEP; 3) regressions of each intra-exposome-group PC on SEP. We found that the three approaches provided consistent and complementary results, suggesting that children with lower SEP are less exposed to urbanisation factors and more exposed to unhealthy lifestyles and diet. From a methodological point of view, we observed that the simplest method (ExWAS) conveys most of the information and is easy to replicate in different contexts, while clustering and PCA may facilitate results interpretation and communication

Bio: Milena Maule is associate professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Turin. She has worked on population-based cancer studies, descriptive, aetiological and quality-of-life studies on childhood cancer, infectious diseases and environmental epidemiology. She collaborates in international projects and is among the coordinators of the Piedmont Childhood Cancer Registry. Among her research topics of interest are causal inference methods, statistical modelling, Bayesian methods and geostatistics. She is a member of the teaching staff of the summer school of the European Educational Programme in Epidemiology.