Assessing causality in environmental sciences

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will be presented by Paolo Vineis, who will explore how researchers assess causal relationships in environmental and health sciences. Drawing on the concepts of epidemiology and the exposome, he offers a reflection on the methodological challenges involved in understanding the complex effects of the environment on human health.

"Causality has always had a practical goal beyond its philosophical appeal. In medicine causality is relevant to therapeutic and preventive choices. Typical questions are whether a drug cures a disease or a vaccine prevents infection. But causality is also involved in more complex questions at the border between biomedicine and social sciences, such as the role of social inequalities in health. The latter is a good example for several reasons: social position is an overarching, complex type of “exposure”, that exerts its influence on health through multiple pathways. The risk is that in biomedicine it is represented in a simplistic way, as it usually happens. In my seminar I describe how in epidemiology we assess causality for single cause-single effect relationships, and then I expand the focus to the field of exposome, i.e. the totality of environmental exposures. I discuss whether we need to adopt a pluralistic view of causal interpretation."

Paolo Vineis is Chair of Environmental Epidemiology at Imperial College, London. His latest research activities focus on investigating biomarkers from omic platforms (including metabolomics and epigenetics) in large epidemiological studies. He has more than 1,200 publications (many as leading author) in journals such as Nature, Science, Lancet, Lancet Oncology. Fellow of Accademia dei Lincei (Italian National Academy of Sciences).