Prof. Tangchun Wu is an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the Dean of Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, National Outstanding Young Scientist, Changjiang Scholars, chief scientist of national 973 project, Ministry of Education in environmental health, and former President of the Cell Stress Society International. He is a leading researcher in environmental factors and human health, published over 540 papers in top journals like JAMA and Nature, with more than 31,000 citations in New England Journal of Medicine and Nature. He has received the second prize of the National Natural Science Award, the National Science & Technology Progress Award, and the National Teaching Achievement Award.

Environment and Health: Evidence for Policy, Action and Mechanism

Environmental exposures, including behavioural, social, and economic factors, along with individual health conditions, are related to disease and mortality risk. However, their combined value for risk prediction and the identification of potentially modifiable exposures remains largely uncertain. This keynote presentation covers the following four themes.

Firstly, an exposome-wide association study was combined with geographically structured machine-learning feature selection to derive a 22-component poly-exposure score from 141 exposure indicators. This score was developed to predict future mortality and identify priority areas for intervention using data from the China Kadoorie Biobank cohorts. Secondly, as air pollution is a major risk factor contributing to the global disease burden, the presentation will introduce evidence on the associations of outdoor and indoor air pollution with the risk of cardiovascular and all-cause mortality, followed by effective prevention strategies. Thirdly, as humans are exposed to a wide variety of environmental factors, the presentation will introduce the associations of 66 plasma elements and/or 103 endocrine-disrupting chemicals with the incidence of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, as well as lung and digestive system cancers, using new evidence from the Dongfeng-Tongji and China Kadoorie Biobank cohorts. Finally, to illuminate biological mechanisms and identify novel exposure and disease biomarkers, the presentation will introduce how circulating proteomic signatures of incident acute myocardial infarction, as an example, link systemic metabolism and plaque vulnerability.

This work was supported by grants from the Noncommunicable Chronic Diseases-National Science and Technology Major Project and National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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