What Can Epidemiological Studies Tell Us about the Impact of Chemical Mixtures on Human Health?
What Can Epidemiological Studies Tell Us about the Impact of Chemical Mixtures on Human Health?
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DOI：
10.1289/ehp.1510569
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发表时间：
2016-01
影响因子：
10.4
通讯作者：
Webster TF
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Braun JM;Gennings C;Hauser R;Webster TF
人类暴露于大量的环境化学品中：其中一些可能是有毒的，许多其他化学品对健康的影响未知或特征不明确。人们对确定暴露于环境化学混合物对人类健康的影响非常感兴趣。随着混合物研究在环境流行病学领域的不断发展，我们必须了解这项研究的方法学挑战以及我们可以使用流行病学数据解决的问题类型。在这篇文章中，我们总结了一些独特的挑战，暴露评估，统计方法和流行病学家在解决化学混合物所面临的方法。我们提出了流行病学研究可以解决的三个广泛问题：a）个别化学剂对健康的潜在影响是什么？B）代理人之间的相互作用是什么？和c）累积接触多种药剂对健康有什么影响？随着混合物研究领域的发展，我们可以使用这三个问题作为定义我们的研究问题和开发方法的基础，这将有助于我们更好地了解化学品暴露对人类疾病和福祉的影响。
Humans are exposed to a large number of environmental chemicals: Some of these may be toxic, and many others have unknown or poorly characterized health effects. There is intense interest in determining the impact of exposure to environmental chemical mixtures on human health. As the study of mixtures continues to evolve in the field of environmental epidemiology, it is imperative that we understand the methodologic challenges of this research and the types of questions we can address using epidemiological data. In this article, we summarize some of the unique challenges in exposure assessment, statistical methods, and methodology that epidemiologists face in addressing chemical mixtures. We propose three broad questions that epidemiological studies can address: a) What are the potential health impacts of individual chemical agents? b) What is the interaction among agents? And c) what are the health effects of cumulative exposure to multiple agents? As the field of mixtures research grows, we can use these three questions as a basis for defining our research questions and for developing methods that will help us better understand the effect of chemical exposures on human disease and well-being.