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A sophisticated tool helps measure exposure to PFAS
A novel metric that estimates our “burden,” or cumulative exposure, to a family of thousands of synthetic chemicals we encounter in everyday life with potentially adverse health effects has been created by a team of researchers at Mount Sinai. In a paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the team reported that their sophisticated tool could have significant benefits for epidemiologists and researchers who routinely measure exposure to this class of chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), which have been linked to high cholesterol, liver damage, thyroid disease and hormonal imbalances. There are only a few methods to quantify...
A sophisticated tool helps measure exposure to PFAS
A novel metric that estimates our “burden,” or cumulative exposure, to a family of thousands of synthetic chemicals we encounter in everyday life with potentially adverse health effects has been created by a team of researchers at Mount Sinai.
In a paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the team reported that their sophisticated tool could have significant benefits for epidemiologists and researchers who routinely measure exposure to this class of chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), which have been linked to high cholesterol, liver damage, thyroid disease and hormonal imbalances.
There are few methods for quantifying individuals' total exposure to mixtures of PFAS chemicals found in our daily lives. For the first time, we have developed a PFAS exposure calculator that considers exposure patterns to many chemicals within the PFAS family, rather than just individual chemical concentrations that current methods focus on. As a result, this robust tool could be extremely useful for biomonitoring by regulators and for disease and health risk assessment.”
Shelley Liu, PhD, lead author of the study and assistant professor, Center for Biostatistics, Division of Population Health Science and Policy, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
PFAS is a class of more than 5,000 chemicals whose fluorocarbon bond gives them the ability to repel oil and water. This design has made them an integral part of a growing number of industrial applications and consumer products in recent decades, such as: B. Stain and water repellents, Teflon-coated pans, paints, cleaning products and food packaging. Additionally, PFAS chemicals do not break down in the environment or in our bodies. Instead, they accumulate in our environment and in our blood, kidneys and liver, as highlighted by a 2007 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that found PFAS could be detected in the blood of 98 percent of the U.S. population.
The Mount Sinai researchers used national biomonitoring data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to develop their exposure exposure score using item response theory. Item response theory was developed in the educational testing literature to score standardized tests, and Mount Sinai researchers are the first to use it in environmental epidemiology to develop an exposure burden score highlighted by this transdisciplinary investigation. Specifically, they used serum concentrations of eight common PFAS chemicals taken from adults and children. By combining a participant's core biomarker concentrations with their much broader “exposure pattern,” i.e. h. its relative exposure to other PFAS biomarkers within the entire chemical class, researchers were able to estimate a cumulative or summary PFAS exposure burden. This statistical methodology can be accessed by other researchers and epidemiologists simply by feeding their datasets into the PFAS exposure calculator, available online.
The benefits are significant. “We found that our method allows comparisons of chemical mixture exposures across studies, even if they do not measure the same set of chemicals, supporting harmonization across studies and consortia,” explains Dr. Liu, whose research focuses heavily on environmental health through latent variable modeling and longitudinal data analysis. Additionally, the calculator provides a simple way to incorporate exposure biomarkers with low detection frequencies and reduce exposure measurement errors by considering both a participant's concentrations and their exposure patterns to estimate chemical mixture exposure levels.
“By capturing individual biomarker variability, we essentially keep the exposure metric constant, allowing it to be used for a variety of applications,” says Dr. Liu. "This could include, for example, studying across populations to determine whether there are differences in exposure levels between racial/ethnic or socioeconomic classes, or whether exposure levels are the same between people in the United States or Canada. Or looking at physiological systems and health effects - such as cardiometabolic, hormonal and immunological - to see which are most disrupted by exposure to PFAS chemicals. This range of applications goes far beyond anything currently on the table the area of population health is available.”
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