Threshold values in toxicology - useful or not?
In many fields of toxicology, numbers are used as threshold values, e.g. as "acceptable daily intake values" resulting in maximum permissible concentrations in food or in animal feed by using "safety factors"; maximal admissible concentrations of toxic substances in the air at the workplace; cut-off values in analytical toxicology; limit values for biological specimens in the case of driving under the influence of drugs, guidance values for environmental specimens, etc. The philosophy behind these values must be well understood and they should only be applied to real cases by persons with enough toxicological background. The bad use of these numbers in toxicology can have dramatic consequences. Especially in regulatory toxicology their use should be made with great care. Moreover, tremendous improvements in analytical methodology, e.g. the decreasing of the limits of detection for many potentially toxic substances in recent years, should not end up in an overestimation of risks to humans. To avoid these abuses careful interpretations of analytical findings by qualified toxicologists are of paramount importance. The use and abuse of some of these threshold values will be outlined in several applications from analytical toxicology, risk assessment issues, forensic toxicology in post-mortem cases, as well as from the drugs and driving cases. Generally, if threshold values are considered as guidance values and not as the "absolute truth" in toxicology, they may be very useful in the interpretation of toxicology data.
Wennig
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Laboratoire National de Santé, Division Toxicologie, CRP-Santé, Centre Universitaire, 162a, av de la Faïencerie, 1511, Luxembourg, Luxembourg. wenning@cu.lu
D005513:Food Inspection; D005554:Forensic Medicine / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D008452:Maximum Allowable Concentration; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D011180:Postmortem Changes; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods; D015813:Substance Abuse Detection / Q000379:methods; D020711:Threshold Limit Values; D014116:Toxicology / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards