Abstract
Despite significant overlaps in mission, the fields of environmental health sciences and aging biology are just beginning to intersect. It is increasingly clear that genetics alone does not predict an individual’s neurological aging and sensitivity to disease. Accordingly, aging neuroscience is a growing area of mutual interest within environmental health sciences. The impetus for this review came from a workshop hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in June of 2020, which focused on integrating the science of aging and environmental health research. It is critical to bridge disciplines with multidisciplinary collaborations across toxicology, comparative biology, epidemiology to understand the impacts of environmental toxicant exposures and age-related outcomes. This scoping review aims to highlight overlaps and gaps in existing knowledge and identify essential research initiatives. It begins with an overview of aging biology and biomarkers, followed by examples of synergy with environmental health sciences. New areas for synergistic research and policy development are also discussed. Technological advances including next-generation sequencing and other-omics tools now offer new opportunities, including exposomic research, to integrate aging biomarkers into environmental health assessments and bridge disciplinary gaps. This is necessary to advance a more complete mechanistic understanding of how life-time exposures to toxicants and other physical and social stressors alter biological aging. New cumulative risk frameworks in environmental health sciences acknowledge that exposures and other external stressors can accumulate across the life course and the advancement of new biomarkers of exposure and response grounded in aging biology can support increased understanding of population vulnerability. Identifying the role of environmental stressors, broadly defined, on aging biology and neuroscience can similarly advance opportunities for intervention and translational research. Several areas of growing research interest include expanding exposomics and use of multi-omics, the microbiome as a mediator of environmental stressors, toxicant mixtures and neurobiology, and the role of structural and historical marginalization and racism in shaping persistent disparities in population aging and outcomes. Integrated foundational and translational aging biology research in environmental health sciences is needed to improve policy, reduce disparities, and enhance the quality of life for older individuals.
Highlights
By 2050, one in five adults living in the United States will be over the age of 65 years
In the sections that follow, we broadly review key biological mechanisms in environmental health and aging research that could support and accelerate focused multi- and transdisciplinary partnerships
Social scientists have long known that place matters to health and aging, and with the advancement of biomarker research, there is a unique opportunity to begin to integrate biology with social and environmental science to understand how and why communities and individuals age differently and what can be modified to reduce significant and persistent disparities
Summary
By 2050, one in five adults living in the United States will be over the age of 65 years. Epigenetic changes and telomere length, two well-established biomarkers of aging, have been altered in utero from environmental exposures including air pollution, metals, and endocrine disruptors (Kohanski et al, 2016; Cardenas et al, 2017; Lee et al, 2020), resulting in intergenerational effects (Brieno-Enriquez et al, 2015; Martos et al, 2015; Nawrot et al, 2018; Ladd-Acosta et al, 2019; Peng et al, 2019; Smith et al, 2020).
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