Introduction to environment and exposome-wide association studies: A data-driven method to identify multiple environmental factors associated with phenotypes in human populations

Abstract

It is a priority to identify multiple environmental factors, or mixtures, associated with disease phenotypes in human populations. However, highthroughput computational methods to identify mixtures that are important in human disease are lacking. This chapter describes the "environment-wide association study" (EWAS) analytic approach to identify a number of environmental exposures in human disease. With the advent of high-throughput environmental exposure information (e.g., exposome), methods such as EWAS will be instrumental to accelerate discovery in disease.