Is epidemiology the key to cumulative risk assessment?
Although cumulative risk assessment by definition evaluates the joint effects of chemical and nonchemical stressors, studies to date have not considered both dimensions, in part because toxicological studies cannot capture many stressors of interest. Epidemiology can potentially include all relevant stressors, but developing and extracting the necessary information is challenging given some of the inherent limitations of epidemiology. In this article, I propose a conceptual framework within which epidemiological studies could be evaluated for their inclusion into cumulative risk assessment, including a problem formulation/planning and scoping step that focuses on stressors meaningful for risk management decisions, extension of the chemical mixtures framework to include nonchemical stressors, and formal consideration of vulnerability characteristics of the population. In the long term, broadening the applicability and informativeness of cumulative risk assessment will require enhanced communication and collaboration between epidemiologists and risk assessors, in which the structure of social and environmental epidemiological analyses may be informed in part by the needs of cumulative risk assessment.
Levy
Jonathan I
JI
Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Environment Health, Boston, MA 02215, USA. jilevy@hsph.harvard.edu
D004781:Environmental Exposure; D004782:Environmental Health; D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D004785:Environmental Pollutants; D004787:Environmental Pollution; D062665:Epidemiological Monitoring; D004813:Epidemiology; D006801:Humans; D011634:Public Health; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods*; D012308:Risk Management
D004785:Environmental Pollutants