Applicability of non-invasively collected matrices for human biomonitoring

Abstract

With its inclusion under Action 3 in the Environment and Health Action Plan 2004–2010 of the European Commission, human biomonitoring is currently receiving an increasing amount of attention from the scientific community as a tool to better quantify human exposure to, and health effects of, environmental stressors. Despite the policy support, however, there are still several issues that restrict the routine application of human biomonitoring data in environmental health impact assessment. One of the main issues is the obvious need to routinely collect human samples for large-scale surveys. Particularly the collection of invasive samples from susceptible populations may suffer from ethical and practical limitations. Children, pregnant women, elderly, or chronically-ill people are among those that would benefit the most from non-invasive, repeated or routine sampling. Therefore, the use of non-invasively collected matrices for human biomonitoring should be promoted as an ethically appropriate, cost-efficient and toxicologically relevant alternative for many biomarkers that are currently determined in invasively collected matrices. This review illustrates that several non-invasively collected matrices are widely used that can be an valuable addition to, or alternative for, invasively collected matrices such as peripheral blood sampling. Moreover, a well-informed choice of matrix can provide an added value for human biomonitoring, as different non-invasively collected matrices can offer opportunities to study additional aspects of exposure to and effects from environmental contaminants, such as repeated sampling, historical overview of exposure, mother-child transfer of substances, or monitoring of substances with short biological half-lives.

Development of a broad spectrum method for measuring flame retardants - Overcoming the challenges of non-invasive human biomonitoring studies

“…Compared to forensic and clinical fields, little is known about hair analysis for determination of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) [56,57]. Hair analysis has been explored for polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) [58][59][60], polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) [61][62][63][64], pesticides [62,65,66], and PBDEs [67][68][69].…”

Body burdens of polybrominated diphenyl ethers in childbearing-aged women at an intensive electronic-waste recycling site in China

“…These include maternal and fetal blood, and milk from the general population in South China (Bi et al 2006), blood serum from e-waste workers in South China (Qu et al 2007), and hair of residents living at an e-waste site in Southeast Zhejiang Province (Zhao et al 2008); PBDE levels were found to be significantly higher than those from reference sites. Hair serves as a noninvasive matrix for the biomonitoring of pollutants (Smolders et al 2009), and breast milk provides information on exposure levels of both the mother and her child (Esteban & Castaño 2009). To date, there are very limited studies of PBDE body burden with regard to the concurrent analyses of multiple human matrices.…”

Measurements of polybrominated diphenyl ethers and polychlorinated biphenyls in a single drop of blood

“…Even at low levels, PBDEs and PCBs can exert undesirable effects on wildlife and human beings. Emergent evidence from biomonitoring program suggested that PBDEs and PCBs, similar to other persistent organic pollutants (POPs), exert certain degree of neurological, endocrine-disrupting, immune-disrupting and genotoxic effects [15][16][17][18]. Therefore, these compounds have been included in biomonitoring programs as well as National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) held by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) extensively.…”