Extended analyses of the association between serum concentrations of persistent organic pollutants and diabetes.

摘要

We recently reported on serum concentrations of six persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and prevalence of diabetes in a random U.S. sample (1).Most previous epidemiologi-cal studies were restricted from studying several POPs given cost and serum amounts needed. Focus on selected POPs may be appropriate in occupational or ac-cidental high exposure, but, in the general population with only background POP exposure, there is a need to study the con-centrations of many interrelated POPs. Our initial approach to risk charac-terization was to calculate a summary to accumulate risk of exposure across six POPs (1). Even though the summary of six POPs was strongly associated with diabetes, individual POPs had substan-tial differences in strength of association (1) Thus, it is also of interest to esti-mate risk within subclasses of POPs that have similar physical and chemical properties. All POPs measured in the National Health and Nutrition Exami-nation Survey (NHANES) can be di-vided into five subclasses: polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), polychlorinated dibenzo-' furans (PCDFs), dioxin-like polychlori-nated biphenyls (PCBs), nondioxin-like PCBs, and organochlorine (OC) pesti-cides.Such specificity about diabetoge-nicity of POP subclasses would be especially important from the view-points of both toxicology and regula-tion. Therefore, in this article we report on the diabetes associations of 19 POPs within five POP subclasses, each de-tected among at least 60% of study sub-jects, i.e., in a manner identical to our most recent analysis of POPs and insu-lin resistance in the NHANES dataset (2).