The environment impacts human health in profound ways, yet few theories define the form of the relationship between human physiology and the environment. It is conjectured that such complex systems cannot interact directly, but rather their interaction requires the formation of an intermediary “interface.” This position contrasts with current epidemiological constructs of causation, which implicitly assume that two complex systems transfer information directly while remaining separate entities. Further, it is contended that dynamic, process‐based interfaces incorporate components from all the interacting (...) systems but exhibit operational independence. This property has many consequences, the foremost being that characteristics of the interface cannot be fully resolved by only studying the systems involved in the interaction. The interface itself must be the subject of inquiry. Without refocusing the attention on biodynamic interfaces, how the environment impacts health cannot be discerned. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/XeyjeZeyo4o. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractWe can, for example, understand intimately how the human endocrine systems works, and likewise the chemical nature of compounds present in our environment; but the result of the interaction cannot be deduced from any simple combination of the two knowledge sets: it's not the interacting entities that we should be studying, but the process that creates the phenomena that we witness as a result of this interaction. This is the “biodynamic interface” to which Manish Arora, Alessandro Giuliani and Paul (...) Curtin refer in their article in this issue, and it is a conceptual structure that comes into being upon interaction of entities: a new way to study interactions in complex systems and better understand emergent phenomena. (shrink)

Recent research has pointed to the importance of the prenatal environment in the etiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but the biological mechanisms which mitigate these environmental factors are not clear. Mitochondrial metabolism abnormalities, inflammation and oxidative stress as common physiological disturbances associated with ASD. Network analysis of the scientific literature identified several leading prenatal environmental factors associated with ASD, particularly air pollution, pesticides, the microbiome and epigenetics. These leading prenatal environmental factors were found to be most associated with inflammation, (...) followed by oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. Other prenatal factors associated with ASD not identified by the network analysis were also found to be significantly associated with these common physiological disturbances. A better understanding of the biological mechanism which mediate the effect of prenatal environmental factors can lead to insights of how ASD develops and the development of targeted therapeutics to prevent ASD from occuring. (shrink)