Estimating Burden and Disease Costs of Exposure to Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals in the European Union

Abstract

EDC exposures in the EU are likely to contribute substantially to disease and dysfunction across the life course with costs in the hundreds of billions of Euros per year. These estimates represent only those EDCs with the highest probability of causation; a broader analysis would have produced greater estimates of burden of disease and costs.

Autism genes are selectively targeted by environmental pollutants including pesticides, heavy metals, bisphenol A, phthalates and many others in food, cosmetics or household products

“…Many of these compounds are endocrine disruptors which have been linked to a variety of diseases, including autism, attention hyperactivity deficit disorder, obesity and diabetes, whose incidence has increased in recent decades. Their annual burden of health cost in the European Union has been estimated at over 100 billion Euros [7,8] .…”

Disruption of the stress response in wastewater treatment works effluent-exposed three-spined sticklebacks persists after translocation to an unpolluted environment

“…There is worldwide concern regarding the effects of chemicals within the environment on wildlife and in particular those that cause adverse effects via interference with the normal function of endocrine-dependent processes (Trasande et al 2015;Zoeller et al 2012). Biota within the aquatic ecosystem are particularly vulnerable to chemical exposure given the range and quantity of anthropogenic contaminants introduced into watercourses, both deliberately and inadvertently (Henze and Comeau 2008;Marcogliese et al 2015).…”

Human environmental disease network: A computational model to assess toxicology of contaminants

“…Crossing the hypotheses made by our approach with some other observations described in the literature could further improve the characterization of potential chemical-disease relationships. For example, a group led by Leonardo Trasande has recently developed a system to estimate health and economic costs related to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) exposure in the European Union (Trasande et al, 2015(Trasande et al, , 2016 and the USA (Attina et al, 2016). To estimate costs, they used available epidemiological and toxicological evidence for each EDC and weighted them.…”