Reproductive Effects of Glycol Ethers in Females: A Quantitative Analysis

摘要

Efforts to produce quantitative estimates of risk for female reproductive effects from exposure to glycol ethers were presented. Dose/response models and other types of inferences were chosen which seemed appropriate in light of the distinctive features of the reproductive effects studied and the data which was available. Glycol ethers were linked with a number of quantal effects including fetal mortality and several types of malformations along with an apparently linear effect on fetal weight. Risks were projected for the quantal and continuous variable categories of adverse reproductive effects using fundamentally different approaches. Assuming a lognormal distribution of effect thresholds in humans and a degree of human interindividual variability inferred from experience, risks for quantal effects were projected. The concentrations of the glycol ethers which the researchers projected may cause various reproductive effects at a frequency of one in a million and one in 10,000 were presented. The risk calculations were based on a series of assumptions and carried considerable uncertainty. Calculations were also undertaken to determine what would happen to the quantal risks if the processes by which glycol ethers caused various affects interacted appreciably with the background processes that produced those same effects in the general population.