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The war exposome: Environmental, chemical, and psychosocial determinants of health
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This review examined how armed conflict reshapes human exposure environments through combinations of chemical, physical, biological, and psychosocial stressors, including environmental contaminants like microplastics. Researchers proposed a 'war exposome' framework to better conceptualize the cumulative and integrative biological consequences of conflict-related exposures on disease risk and population health.
Abstract Armed conflict profoundly reshapes human exposure environments by generating intense and heterogeneous combinations of chemical, physical, biological, and psychosocial stressors. These exposures do not occur in isolation but interact dynamically across the life course, potentially influencing biological systems, disease risk, and population health in complex and insufficiently understood ways. While growing evidence documents war-related environmental contamination and mental health impacts, their cumulative and integrative biological consequences remain inadequately conceptualized within existing environmental health frameworks. This perspective introduces the concept of the war exposome as a unifying framework to capture the totality of exposures generated or intensified by armed conflict. War-related exposures are characterized by high intensity, temporal compression, spatial heterogeneity, and frequent coincidence with sensitive developmental and biological windows. Environmental degradation, uncontrolled combustion, infrastructure damage, and disrupted water and sanitation systems generate complex mixtures of chemical and physical hazards, including heavy metals, disinfection by-products, persistent pollutants, and microplastics. These hazards interact with chronic psychosocial stress, trauma, displacement, and behavioral disruption, shaping biological vulnerability through shared pathways such as immune dysregulation, oxidative stress, endocrine perturbation, and epigenetic modification. We outline a war-adapted exposome research framework integrating environmental mapping, human biomonitoring, psychosocial assessment, and data integration using exposome-oriented analytical approaches, while addressing ethical, logistical, and data-governance challenges specific to conflict settings. Conceptualizing armed conflict through an exposome lens may advance interdisciplinary research, inform humanitarian health surveillance, and support evidence-based post-conflict recovery and reconstruction strategies.
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This review introduces the idea of a "triple exposure" from microplastics: the physical plastic particles themselves, the chemicals built into the plastic during manufacturing, and environmental pollutants that stick to plastic surfaces. All three exposure types can enter the human body through food, water, and air, and may have combined health effects that are worse than any single exposure alone. The authors argue that health risk assessments need to account for all three factors together.
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This review takes an integrative toxicological perspective on how microplastic exposure may affect human health, examining exposure routes through food, water, and air. Researchers summarize evidence that microplastics' small size, durability, and surface reactivity enable them to adsorb heavy metals, form biofilms, and enter food chains. The study highlights that while evidence of harm is growing, significant gaps remain in understanding the long-term health implications of chronic microplastic exposure.
Multiple Effects, Pathways, and Potential Health Risks from Environmental Microplastic Exposure
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This review synthesizes nearly two decades of research on the multiple pathways through which environmental microplastics affect human and ecological health, including chemical toxicity, physical impacts, and potential roles as carriers of pathogens and contaminants.
Microplastics and Their Toxicological Impacts on Human Health: An Overview
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Researchers synthesize recent literature on microplastic contamination, covering sources, environmental distribution, detection methods, and mechanistic evidence linking MP exposure to oxidative stress, inflammation, mitochondrial damage, and potential neurotoxic and carcinogenic effects across multiple human organ systems.
The Prenatal Exposome: A Salutogenic Framework for Reversing Cumulative Social and Environmental Toxic Loads to Promote Fetal Wholeness
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This paper proposes a new way of thinking about pregnancy health: instead of just tracking harm from pollution and stress, it argues we should build up protective factors—like clean environments, strong social support, and even time in nature—that help babies thrive despite everyday exposures to things like air pollution, heavy metals, and microplastics. It's a conceptual framework rather than a study with new data, but it makes an important point: combined stress from unequal social conditions and environmental toxins (including microplastics) can compound each other's harm to fetal development, so solutions need to address community and policy-level change, not just individual behavior.
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