Assessing the risk of exposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals

The risk assessment process has been guided by principles of toxicology since it was developed some 50 years ago. These principles posit that toxicity decreases with decreasing doses. Thus, toxicity studies typically test chemicals starting at high doses and proceeding to progressively lower doses aiming to identify a dose at which no adverse effects are observed and extrapolating to predicted safe doses using additional factors to account for uncertainties in the accuracy of the animal model and test conditions. Thus the predicted safe dose is calculated but not tested. Over the last twenty years or so scientists have developed data showing that certain chemicals that disrupt endocrine signaling, e.g. endocrine disrupting Chemicals (EDCs), can act at low doses (in the range of low level environmentally relevant human exposures) in animal studies, and may show dose responses where the slope of the response changes direction i.e. non-monotonic dose responses (NMDR). If this scenario is true, the assumption that lower levels are safer may not be always correct.

MUNN Sharon;  HEINDEL Jerry J.; 

2014-01-10

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

JRC81646

0045-6535,   

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653513009910,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC81646,   

10.1016/j.chemosphere.2013.07.007,