Exposome-Wide Association Study
An exposome-wide association study (ExWAS), originally introduced as the Environment-Wide Association Study, applies the logic of the genome-wide association study to the environment. Where a GWAS scans hundreds of thousands of genetic variants for association with a trait, an ExWAS scans a broad panel of measured environmental exposures — nutrients, pollutants, chemical biomarkers, infectious markers, and behaviors — against a health outcome, fitting one adjusted regression per exposure and then rigorously controlling the multiple-testing burden across the whole set. The approach was demonstrated by Chirag Patel, Jayanta Bhattacharya, and Atul Butte in 2010 on type 2 diabetes using NHANES data, and it operationalizes Christopher Wild's 2005 concept of the 'exposome': the totality of environmental exposures complementing the genome. ExWAS turns environmental epidemiology from a one-exposure-at-a-time enterprise into a systematic, hypothesis-generating discovery scan.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Patel, C. J., Bhattacharya, J., & Butte, A. J. (2010). An Environment-Wide Association Study (EWAS) on Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. PLoS ONE, 5(5), e10746. · DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0010746
- Wild, C. P. (2005). Complementing the genome with an 'exposome': the outstanding challenge of environmental exposure measurement in molecular epidemiology. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, 14(8), 1847-1850. · DOI 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-05-0456
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