Endocrine Disruptors: Advances in Assessing Environmental Health Risk and Human Health

Exogenous chemicals can interact with hormone receptors, disrupt hormone synthesis and metabolism, and dysregulate hormone signalling pathways to induce adverse effects in individuals, their progeny, and populations. While endocrine disruption is generally regarded as an important issue in toxicology, it has been variously defined, and the health effects continue to be hotly debated. Thus, there is need for a re-examination of the endocrine disruption literature with attention to providing direction for the following: the definition of an endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC); the interpretation of dose response curves and the relevance of the inverted U-shaped dose response curve, the standardized test methods (e.g., the use of concurrent vs. contemporaneous vs. historical controls; testing for EDCs in animal chow and bedding; the effects of the developmental stage on outcome measures; and the assessment of reproductive/developmental, neurophysiology, behavioural, immunological, adrenal, and thyroid toxicity across the life-span and across generations); the strengths and limitations of screening tests (in vitro and in vivo); the assessment of emerging chemicals for endocrine disruption and impact of alternatives to existing chemicals (e.g. bisphenol-A and phthalate substitutes); lessons learned from biomonitoring studies; the epidemiology of endocrine-disrupting chemical effects in children, men, and women; the role of EDCs in the obesity epidemic and their reproductive/developmental effects; and how EDCs modulate phenomic, genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic effects; and how these results should be interpreted in a regulatory context. The role of endocrine disruption in hormone-dependent cancers (e.g., breast, ovary, endometrium, cervix, testes, and prostate) will also be explored.

Prof. Warren G. Foster
Dr. Anne Marie Gannon
Guest Editors

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• endocrine disruptors
• reproductive and endocrine toxicology
• thyroid
• obesity
• neurobehavior
• immune dysfunction
• hormone-dependent cancer