Growing evidence highlights environmental exposures-including diet, physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption, and socioeconomic factors-as key determinants of human health across the lifespan. Rapid lifestyle changes and increasing environmental pressures in modern societies have amplified the influence of these modifiable factors on a wide range of diseases. The UK Biobank, with its extensive environmental, lifestyle, multi-omics, and long-term health outcome data, provides a unique platform to investigate these relationships. This study aims to elucidate the causal relationships and biological mechanisms linking environmental exposures to diverse human diseases by integrating environmental profiling with genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and clinical data. The project will focus on four main objectives:
(1) assessing the effects of lifestyle and environmental factors on the development and progression of diseases across multiple systems, including cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, immune, metabolic, musculoskeletal, digestive systems, and cancers;
(2) identifying multi-omics mediators and molecular pathways through which environmental exposures influence disease risk;
(3) exploring gene-environment interactions to understand how environmental factors modify genetic susceptibility;
(4) developing risk prediction and prevention strategies based on modifiable exposures and their biological markers.
