Modifiable risks key to boosting healthy life expectancy, say researchers

Research increasingly shows that tackling modifiable exposures and environmental risks could be one of our most powerful levers for longevity and health span.

Scientists say this knowledge could help us design better solutions to create environments that promote human health to address the global health and economic crises caused by the chronic disease epidemic and ageing demographic.

A Comment article published in Nature Medicine today, co-authored by University of Glasgow Professor Paul Shiels, sets out why leading scientists are calling for a “Human Exposome Project” a generation on from the Human Genome Project, to understand how the “exposome,” encapsulated by external exposures (including social, behavioral and geo-physical factors) and their interaction with internal factors (such as genetics and physiology), affect an individual’s health and overall resilience.

Professor Shiels created the concept of the Exposome of Aging in 2021, and it has since gained traction around the world. The concept shows that while genetics play a role in our health, modifiable environmental factors explain far more about the variation in premature mortality between individuals and different populations than genes do.

It is already understood that specific environmental factors can activate pathological pathways that contribute to disease and accelerate ageing. The ability to capture, analyze and link individual data outside the medical record can show how external exposures a human experiences across their lifetime affect their health.

Researchers say these interactions can now be much better understood at an individual level and can be traced with unprecedented precision using artificial intelligence. This understanding at a personal level will be a significant leap forward in determining the impact of the exposome at an aggregated, population health level.

Focusing on the Human Exposome has the potential to increase our understanding of how individual health is determined by non-genetic factors in people’s wider environments, and shape more effective public health interventions urgently needed to shift investment and policy away from an increasingly unsustainable healthcare model to one more rooted in prevention.

Tina Woods, steering committee member, Exposome Moonshot Forum CEO, Collider Health, executive director of the International Institute of Longevity, and corresponding author, says, “The time for the Human Exposome Project has come. The ageing demographic and chronic disease epidemic are creating an economic drag in many nations, and the current model of health care focused on treating disease is unsustainable. We now have the tools to demonstrate the return on investing in health and incentivizing prevention.”

Professor Shiels, professor of geroscience at the University of Glasgow and co-author of the study, said, “It is thrilling to see the concept of the exposome of ageing, originally developed to understand the extremes of age-related health inequalities at the University of Glasgow, blossom into a global approach to move sick care into the realm of health care.”

Professor David Furman, Buck Institute for Research on Ageing, Director of the Stanford 1000 Immunomes Project, and corresponding author says, “At a time of increasing environmental threats to human health such as air pollution and microplastics, we have the technologies like applied artificial intelligence to help us to unravel the complex interactions between environment, immunity and health at an individual level that can be aggregated up to get a true picture of the relative impact drivers of population health.”

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UK | April 2026 | FA-11628072