Environmental Stressors and Metabolic Disease

In this collection, Xing et al {this issue} provided new light into the adverse health effect and the mechanism by which chronic constant light exposure exacerbates obesityrelated kidney disease. With a rat model of high fat diet-induced renal injury, they demonstrated that constant light exposure exacerbated obesity, insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, as well as renal functional decline and fibrosis in high fat-fed rats by increasing renal hypoxia induced factor 1α (HIF1α) and decreasing in prolyl hydroxylase domain 1 (PHD1) and PHD2 expression in the kidney. In regard to the impact of benzene pollution in metabolic disease, Cui et al {this issue} investigated the effect of benzene exposure on adipose tissues using both in vivo and in vitro experiments. Coincident with dysregulated gene expression involved in lipogenesis and lipolysis, benzene exposedmale C57BL/6J mice exhibited reduced body fat content and adipokine levels due to lipoatrophy in white adipose tissue.In terms of pathophysiological consequences of fine airborne particulate matter In this issue, a review article by Koshko et al {this issue} highlighted the current understanding of the links between prenatal pollutant exposure and the hypothalamic programming of metabolism (8). The other review article by Roth and Petriello {this issue} discussed the links between polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) pollution and type 2 diabetes and the methods of statistical analyses to determine the links.In summary, we anticipate that this collection of research and review articles from the front-running scientists will help the biomedical research community and public health professionals get a glimpse of new topics on the adverse health effects and mechanistic basis of environmental risk factors-caused illnesses. While much work in understanding the effects and mechanistic basis of environmental stressors in modern human complex diseases remains to be done, we hope that this topic will trigger more interest in this important research direction.