Happiness and its molecular fingerprints

Abstract

Happiness and well-being are in part heritable, but modifiable traits. The promotion of well-being and happiness, much like the primary prevention of non-communicable diseases (NCD), will become increasingly important in a world that is facing an NCD epidemic due to demographic aging and urbanization. The costs for the often lifelong treatment of NCDs are already high and may increase further with the arrival of expensive personalized medicine. The effective promotion of happiness at the individual and population level in order to guide policy requires a causal and mechanistic understanding of its modifiable determinants. With more than half of the world’s population living in cities, it becomes, for example, important to understand how environmental, social, and lifestyle characteristics of urban life influence well-being. Yet, the correlation between many of these factors and the fact that they act in concert poses a large challenge in causal inference. The -omics biomarkers which form a pillar of personalized medicine are at the same time essential research instruments of modern-day observational epidemiology. The paper discusses how they can be applied to overcome the challenges researchers face in studies on the association of complex risk and protective patterns with specific well-being phenotypes and their relation to diseases. Important concepts are discussed in the context of well-being that were recently developed by epidemiologists to stimulate more investments into the understanding of the modifiable part of health (e.g., Exposome; Meet-in-the-Middle; Mendelian Randomization) to match the huge investments that went into genetic research.