Environmental Determinants of Gastrointestinal Diseases: From Exposure to Multi-Omic Mechanisms

Gastrointestinal diseases represent a growing global health challenge. Across diverse regions of the world, the incidence and prevalence of inflammatory, metabolic, neoplastic, and functional gastrointestinal disorders continue to rise. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) offers a good example: once largely a Western disease, it is now emerging rapidly in newly industrialized regions. Similar trends are observed across a range of gastrointestinal conditions, such as irritable bowel disorder and other DGBIs, reflecting broader demographic, environmental, and lifestyle transitions.While genetic susceptibility contributes to disease risk, it explains only a proportion of observed variance and cannot account for the speed or geographic distribution of these epidemiological shifts. Genome-wide association studies have identified numerous risk loci across gastrointestinal diseases, yet effect sizes are modest and predictive power remains limited. The rapid global rise in disease burden strongly implicates environmental and lifestyle factors as key drivers interacting with host biology.Dietary westernisation, antibiotic exposure, air pollution, urban living, altered microbial ecosystems, psychosocial stress, and smoking are among the exposures increasingly linked to gastrointestinal pathology. These factors may not act independently; rather, they intersect through complex host–environment interactions that shape immune regulation, epithelial barrier integrity, metabolic function, and tissue repair. Understanding how such exposures are biologically embedded and translated into disease risk remains a central challenge for the field.Multi-omic approaches provide an unprecedented opportunity to address this challenge. Integrative analyses spanning genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and microbiome profiling enable mechanistic insight into how environmental signals are sensed, processed, and sustained within host regulatory networks. These technologies allow investigators to move beyond association, illuminating the pathways through which environmental and lifestyle factors influence disease initiation, progression, and therapeutic response.This Research Topic seeks to bring together basic and clinical studies that bring translational perspective to advance understanding of environmental determinants in gastrointestinal disease. We welcome basic and translational science, original research and reviews addressing:• Epidemiologic studies to understand the drivers of gastrointestinal disorders• Environmental and lifestyle drivers of gastrointestinal disorders• Gene–environment and microbiome–environment interactions• Epigenetic and transcriptional consequences of environmental exposures• Multi-omic integration and systems biology approaches• Mechanistic studies linking exposure to immune and epithelial dysfunction• Rigorous negative or null findings that challenge prevailing hypotheses and refine our understanding of environmental contributions to diseaseBy bridging population-level observations with molecular mechanisms, this collection aims to clarify how environmental change reshapes gastrointestinal health and to identify actionable pathways for disease prevention and precision medicine. Topic editors: Alexandra Noble, Xue Li, Judith Wellens Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79129/environmental-determinants-of-gastrointestinal-diseases-from-exposure-to-multi-omic-mechanisms