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Presenter: Samantha Matkowski

Faculty Sponsor: Laura N. Vandenberg

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Biology

Session: Poster Session 5, 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM, Auditorium, A60

ABSTRACT

Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC) are found in a wide range of everyday products, including plastics, cosmetics, pesticides, and food packaging, making human exposures extremely common unavoidable. Increasing evidence suggests that EDC exposures are contributing to adverse health outcomes, including reproductive dysfunction, metabolic diseases including obesity, neurodevelopmental disorders, and hormone mediated cancers. With hundreds of thousands of chemicals currently in commerce, the vast majority have never undergone comprehensive testing for endocrine disrupting activities, contributing to major gaps in research that limit accurate hazard identification. Despite this, current approaches used to identify EDCs, and regulatory systems often fail and are ineffective at protecting human populations. In our project, we described the frameworks used to evaluate EDCs and characterized their hazards and risks. Our evaluation identified major limitations in current EDC evaluation strategies including: the failure of these approaches to capture sensitive windows of development, the presence of low-dose effects and non-monotonic dose response relationships, which are essential in evaluating human health outcomes. We discuss the rush to implement new approach methodologies (NAMs) which inadequately account for the multi-level nature of the endocrine system. Exposure assessments additionally rely on outdated assumptions including underestimates of real-world exposures and an inability to account for cumulative exposures to chemical mixtures which reflect real conditions. These identified limitations suggest that the existing hazard and risk assessment frameworks will not protect human populations from EDC exposures or their impacts on health.