Adopting a child perspective for exposome research on mental health and cognitive development - Conceptualisation and opportunities.

Mental disorders among children and adolescents pose a significant global challenge. The exposome framework covering the totality of internal, social and physical exposures over a lifetime provides opportunities to better understand the causes of and processes related to mental health, and cognitive functioning. The paper presents a conceptual framework on exposome, mental health, and cognitive development in children and adolescents, with potential mediating pathways, providing a possibility for interventions along the life course. The paper underscores the significance of adopting a child perspective to the exposome, acknowledging children's specific vulnerability, including differential exposures, susceptibility of effects and capacity to respond; their susceptibility during development and growth, highlighting neurodevelopmental processes from conception to young adulthood that are highly sensitive to external exposures. Further, critical periods when exposures may have significant effects on a child's development and future health are addressed. The paper stresses that children's behaviour, physiology, activity pattern and place for activities make them differently vulnerable to environmental pollutants, and calls for child-specific assessment methods, currently lacking within today's health frameworks. The importance of understanding the interplay between structure and agency is emphasized, where agency is guided by social structures and practices and vice-versa. An intersectional approach that acknowledges the interplay of social and physical exposures as well as a global and rural perspective on exposome is further pointed out. To advance the exposome field, interdisciplinary efforts that involve multiple scientific disciplines are crucial. By adopting a child perspective and incorporating an exposome approach, we can gain a comprehensive understanding of how exposures impact children's mental health and cognitive development leading to better outcomes.

Early environmental quality and life-course mental health effects: The Equal-Life project.

BACKGROUND: There is increasing evidence that a complex interplay of factors within environments in which children grows up, contributes to children's suboptimal mental health and cognitive development. The concept of the life-course exposome helps to study the impact of the physical and social environment, including social inequities, on cognitive development and mental health over time. METHODS: Equal-Life develops and tests combined exposures and their effects on children's mental health and cognitive development. Data from eight birth-cohorts and three school studies (N = 240.000) linked to exposure data, will provide insights and policy guidance into aspects of physical and social exposures hitherto untapped, at different scale levels and timeframes, while accounting for social inequities. Reasoning from the outcome point of view, relevant stakeholders participate in the formulation and validation of research questions, and in the formulation of environmental hazards. Exposure assessment combines GIS-based environmental indicators with omics approaches and new data sources, forming the early-life exposome. Statistical tools integrate data at different spatial and temporal granularity and combine exploratory machine learning models with hypothesis-driven causal modeling. CONCLUSIONS: Equal-Life contributes to the development and utilization of the exposome concept by (1) integrating the internal, physical and social exposomes, (2) studying a distinct set of life-course effects on a child's development and mental health (3) characterizing the child's environment at different developmental stages and in different activity spaces, (4) looking at supportive environments for child development, rather than merely pollutants, and (5) combining physical, social indicators with novel effect markers and using new data sources describing child activity patterns and environments.

The Effects of Noise on Cognitive Performance and Helplessness in Childhood: A Review.

Environmental noise affects our daily functioning in many ways, and the cognitive, motivational, and emotional effects of noise are intertwined. Our task performance under noisy conditions depends on our ability to cope with the noise and our cognitive resources. The process of (failed) coping may wear us out cognitively, lead to learned helplessness, and, consequently, alter the motivation to persist in a task. The direct effect of irrelevant sounds on cognitive functioning in children is relatively well-established, however, the research on the framework of learned helplessness is limited when it comes to children. Learned helplessness can give more insight into effects of environmental noise on learning and child development and how the effects of short-term and long-term exposure interact. A systematic literature review is performed to assess to what extent the current evidence addresses the (interaction) effects of the sound environment on cognition and learned helplessness as measured by motivation in children and young adults up to the age of 21. The search resulted in 8 included papers that addressed both cognition and learned helplessness in their research. The included papers study children between 8-13 years old and show evidence for a relation between environmental noise, cognition, and helplessness individually, but none study a possible interaction. Based on the individual study designs, it could be hypothesized that cognitive fatigue may play a role in the interaction. Studies that conducted motivation tasks after cognitive tasks found stronger effects than those that conducted tasks in a random order. More research is needed using the same methods in different age groups to further assess the interaction between cognition and learned helplessness in relation to the sound environment.