Recently I’ve been reading about the social exposome and its impact on brain health, and I find the concept fascinating.
The social exposome is an emerging framework that aims to capture the totality of social exposures that shape our health and biology across the lifespan. It’s not just about throwing education, income, or social relationships into an analysis, but about building an integrated map that spans psychosocial, socioeconomic, cultural, and demographic dimensions throughout an individual’s life.
We’re used to a more traditional approach where these variables are treated as simple “confounders,” but the social exposome reframes them as structural determinants that shape behaviors, environmental risks, and internal biological responses.
This perspective has gained traction in fields like neuroscience and public health, showing how accumulated social conditions can leave deep marks on the brain and on cognitive development.
Personally, I’ve been following for months the work of BrainLat and ReDLat on the social exposome and brain health in Latin America.
Their approach integrates large datasets and concrete analyses of healthy aging and different types of dementia, demonstrating how the social exposome affects brain structure, function, and pathology.
They’ve used multimodal neuroimaging and clinical data from hundreds of control participants and individuals with various neurodegenerative diseases across several Latin American countries. This effort aims to generate scalable biomarkers and tools adapted to contexts of inequality, allowing researchers to examine how regional social environments influence disease trajectories. Also, they have operationalized a multidimensional social exposome for the region.
When I tried to find something similar in Parkinson’s disease, I realized that although social factors such as isolation and loneliness have been studied, most research treats them as individual-level risks rather than constructing comprehensive social exposome indices.
For example, UK Biobank cohorts show that loneliness and social isolation independently predict a higher risk of PD. On the other hand, global studies based on the GBD framework demonstrate sociodemographic inequalities in the burden of PD across countries and levels of development.
In short, in PD, many components of the social exposome—especially isolation, deprivation, stigma, and support—have clear links to disease risk, progression, and quality of life. But comprehensive, multidimensional social exposome models still seem to be a necessary direction we need to move toward.
What do you think about this?
References
Social exposome and brain health outcomes of dementia across Latin America. Nature Communications, 16. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63277-6
Neuroecological links of the exposome and One Health. Neuron, 112, 1905-1910. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.04.016
Addressing the gaps between socioeconomic disparities and biological models of dementia.. Brain : a journal of neurology, 146 9, 3561-3564. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awad236
The BrainLat project, a multimodal neuroimaging dataset of neurodegeneration from underrepresented backgrounds. Scientific Data, 10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02806-8
Social isolation and the risk of Parkinson disease in the UK biobank study. NPJ Parkinson’s Disease, 10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41531-024-00700-7
Loneliness and Risk of Parkinson Disease. JAMA Neurology, 80, 1138 - 1144. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2023.3382
Mapping the global burden of early-onset Parkinson’s disease: socioeconomic and regional inequalities from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. Frontiers in Public Health, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1618533
Global, regional, and national health inequalities of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease in 204 countries, 1990–2019. International Journal for Equity in Health, 23. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-024-02212-5
