An Overview of the NIEHS-EPA Pilot Study of Exposure to Chemicals in Consumer Products

摘要

Consumer products provide a highly efficient means of exposure to thousands of chemicals for which risk is poorly understood. NIEHS conducted a large health study known as the Sister Study relying on questionnaires to assess exposure. The current pilot study is motivated by NIEHS's interest in evaluating their questionnaire-based exposure assessment against objective measures of exposure as well as EPA's interest in examining modeling approaches to exposure estimation. A small-scale, longitudinal study of women will investigate the performance of existing measurements and modeling methods to assess exposures to chemicals in personal care and household products. The overall goal of this study is to determine the effectiveness of those methods to assess exposures to chemicals in a number of consumer product categories. This will be achieved by collecting extensive and repeated exposure-related information and measurements from adult female participants (N=9) between the ages of 35 and 74 years over a consecutive 10- day period. Innovative tools for exposure assessment will be assessed for their utility through low burden, cost-efficient methods that simultaneously allow for the measurement of multiple chemical agents and the gathering of contextual information. Specifically, this study will obtain measurable concentrations of consumer product chemicals and metabolites from 24-h daily urine voids, blood serum, indoor surface sampling, airborne and particulate sampling, household vacuum sweepings, duplicate diet sampling, and silicon bracelets, to resolve potential chemical exposures. Individual behaviors and ethnographical data will be captured through food photo diaries, product use video journaling and daily web survey, GPS and accelerometers. These integrated tools and techniques will be used to refine measurement and predictive modeling methods that support high throughput chemical analysis and exposure assessment and inform exposure reduction.