What is this about?
The exposome represents the totality of life course environmental exposures (including lifestyle and other non-genetic factors), from the prenatal period onwards. This holistic concept of exposure provides a new framework to advance the understanding of complex and multifactorial diseases. Prospective pregnancy and birth cohort studies provide a unique opportunity for exposome research as they are able to capture, from prenatal life onwards, both the external and the internal domains of the exposome. In this paper the steps required for applying an exposome approach are described and the main strengths and limitations of different statistical approaches are discussed, with the aim to provide guidance for methodological choices in the analysis of exposome data in birth cohort studies.