LONGITOOLS will develop a holistic exposomic approach to this important health, societal and environmental challenge – LONGITOOLS will operationalise a very large and detailed set of longitudinal data with repeated measures spanning form the pre-conceptional period until late adulthood. The conceptualisation of the exposome paradigm defines the health status at any time during the life-course as being a function of a cumulative effect of all exposures an individual has been exposed to. In comparison to traditional models linking environmental exposure to a health outcome, an exposome-wide model will use the multiple dimensions within the data to reduce the fragmented view of a problem. Future opportunities to address the epidemic of MC-NCD, very likely to be a causal consequence of obesity, will depend on the capacity to:

i) model and utilise the correlation structure linking the environmental exposures to the life-course risk of MC-NCD e.g. social disadvantage linked to obesogenic urban design linked to pollution(s) linked to unhealthy behaviour (see impact section);

ii) define the possible paths (and the resilience factors) through which an unfavourable environment may cause health deterioration and

iii) identify from a silo of possible internal exposome how the environmental exposures convert into possible biological cause affecting the health risk (and vice-versa)

LONGITOOLS’s overarching aim is to harness the temporal dimensions in the exposome influencing the bi-directional association observed between individual health and the environment based on longitudinal models with repeated measures and survey of the exposome. The data incorporated as well as the researchers, knowledge managers and innovative network will be harnessed to demonstrate the temporal causality from the pre-conceptional period up until old age, with a dedicated focus on the life-course aetiology of circulatory, cardiac and metabolic NCDs.

We will empower this innovative consortium to adapt and develop statistical approaches of data-mining in exposomics with longitudinal built-in. We will focus on the changes in the epigenomic, metabolomics, and transcriptomics responses to encompass the internal dynamics. We will incorporate latent trajectory methods in the analysis of specific effect modifiers including diet, physical activity and behaviours. A first key exploitable tool for LONGITOOLS will be the integration in an exposome econometric life-course model of circulatory, cardiac and metabolic NCDs developed in longitudinal birth cohort studies. A second tool LONGITOOLS for impact will exploit our knowledge and innovative network to maximise impact towards innovative research, new technology and environmental and health policies.

All data and tools of LONGITOOLS will be harmonized alongside on-going European initiatives [DynaHEALTH, LifeCycle, BBMRI, EUCAN-Connect and EUCanSHare], Joint Project Initiatives PREcisE (ICL), NutriPROGRAM (EMC) and DiGuMet (CUT), we anticipate interaction with other funded projects to integrate LONGITOOLS into the EU Human Exposome Project Where additional health trajectories can be studied.