Handbook for Conducting a Literature-Based Health Assessment Using OHAT Approach for Systematic Review and Evidence Integration.

摘要

The National Toxicology Program (NTP) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences established the NTP Office of Health Assessment and Translation (OHAT) to serve as an environmental health resource to the public and to regulatory and health agencies (Bucher et al. 2011). This office conducts evaluations to assess the evidence that environmental chemicals, physical substances, or mixtures (collectively referred to as "substances") cause adverse health effects and provides opinions on whether these substances may be of concern, given what is known about current human exposure levels. The opinions are referred to as NTP Level of Concern (LoC) conclusions. OHAT also organizes workshops or state-of-the-science evaluations to address issues of importance in environmental health sciences. OHAT assessments are typically published as OHAT monographs, meeting reports, and/or peer-reviewed journal publications. This document is intended to serve as a handbook, or standard operating procedures (SOP), for the development of systematic review for conducting OHAT evaluations. The SOPs are based on (1) lessons learned from developing protocols for two case studies for implementing systematic review, (2) consideration of public comments received on systematic review during the past two years, and (3) discussions with experts at other organizations and agencies working on applying methods of systematic review to environmental health and toxicology. It provides an overview of the general OHAT evaluation process, including systematic review methodology, and procedures used to integrate evidence and to support conclusions.