Health Risks of Phthalates

Consensus

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People are exposed to a variety of chemicals throughout their daily lives. To protect public health, regulators use risk assessments to examine the effects of chemical exposures. This book provides guidance for assessing the risk of phthalates, chemicals found in many consumer products that have been shown to affect the development of the male reproductive system of laboratory animals.
Because people are exposed to multiple phthalates and other chemicals that affect male reproductive development, a cumulative risk assessment should be conducted that evaluates the combined effects of exposure to all these chemicals. The book suggests an approach for cumulative risk assessment that can serve as a model for evaluating the health risks of other types of chemicals.

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Publication information

208 pages · 6 x 9 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-12841-2
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-12842-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/12528

Suggested citation

National Research Council. 2008. Phthalates and Cumulative Risk Assessment: The Tasks Ahead. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Deborah A. Cory-Slechta

DEBORAH CORY-SLECHTA (Chair) is a professor of environmental medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. She was formerly director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute and Chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Her research interests include the relationships between neurotransmitter systems and behavior, and how such relationships are altered by exposure to environmental toxicants, particularly the role of environmental neurotoxicants in developmental disabilities and neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Cory-Slechta has served on numerous national research review and advisory panels, including those for the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She served on the National Research Council’s Committee on Human Health Risks of Trichloroethylene and the Committee on Toxicology and on the Institute of Medicine’s Committees on Gulf War and Health: Literature Review of Pesticides and Solvents. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

Edmund A. Crouch

EDMUND CROUCH is a senior scientist with Cambridge Environmental, Inc. He has published widely in the areas of environmental quality, biostatistics, risk assessment, and presentation and analysis of uncertainties. He has co-authored a major text in risk assessment, Risk/Benefit Analysis. Dr. Crouch serves as an expert advisor to various local and national agencies concerned with public health and the environment and has served on eight National Research Council committees. He has written computer programs for the sophisticated analysis of results from carcinogenesis bioassays; has developed algorithms (on the levels of both theory and computer implementation) for the objective quantification of waste-site contamination; and has designed Monte Carlo simulations for purposes of fully characterizing uncertainties and variabilities inherent in health risk assessment. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, England, in high energy physics.

Paul Foster

PAUL FOSTER is currently the Acting Chief of the Toxicology Operations Branch and Deputy Director of the National Toxicology Program’s Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Research Triangle Park, NC. His recent research is focused on investigating the mechanisms of environmental chemical and drug effects on reproductive development. Before joining NIEHS in 2002, he was the director of the research program in endocrine, reproductive and developmental toxicology at the CIIT Centers for Health Research. Dr. Foster’s research interests include understanding the potential human health effects of environmental endocrine disruptors (particularly antiandrogens); mechanisms of testicular toxicity; the study of early testicular Leydig cell dysfunction induced by chemicals as a prelude to hyperplasia and tumors; and the toxicokinetic and dynamic parameters affecting the induction of reproductive and developmental toxicity. He also has a broad interest in risk assessment issues in those areas. Dr. Foster has served on numerous national and international advisory committees dealing with reproductive toxicology and endocrine disruption, including the Federal Advisory Committee on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program. He has also served on National Research Council committees, including the Subcommittee on Reproductive and Developmental Toxicology. He earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and toxicology at Brunel University, United Kingdom.

Mary A. Fox

MARY FOX is assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research is focused on quantitative risk assessment as a part of public health decision-making, particularly approaches to cumulative or chemical mixtures risk assessment. Dr. Fox tested cumulative risk assessment methods in a community case study that demonstrated associations between cumulative risk metrics and public health outcomes in the neighborhoods of South and Southwest Philadelphia. She has applied cumulative risk methods in assessments of health risks in New Orleans post-hurricane and in a community built over a former chemical weapons testing site. Her current research projects include examining exposure to a mixture of nephrotoxic metals and kidney function and addressing model uncertainty and potential for error in cumulative exposure assessments for pesticides as mandated by the Food Quality Protection Act. Dr. Fox earned her M.P.H. from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Kevin Gaido

KEVIN GAIDO is senior investigator with the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences. His research specialty is the field of receptor-mediated mechanisms of toxicity. Dr. Gaido’s current interests focus on characterizing chemical interaction with steroid hormone receptors and characterizing the resulting cellular and molecular responses. Dr. Gaido earned his Ph.D. in pharmacology and toxicology from the West Virginia University Medical Center.

Maida Galvez

MAIDA GALVEZ is an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine and the Department of Pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She is a board certified pediatrician who directs Mount Sinai's Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit and practices general pediatrics. She is co-principal investigator and a designated new investigator of an NIEHS/EPA funded research project entitled "Growing Up Healthy in East Harlem," a community based participatory research project examining the environmental determinants of childhood obesity. She is also co-investigator of an NIEHS/NCI funded project assessing environmental determinants of puberty in girls. Her research interests include the urban built environment, endocrine disruptors, and childhood growth and development. Dr. Galvez earned her M.D. and M.P.H. from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Chris Gennings

CHRIS GENNINGS is professor of biostatistics at the Virginia Commonwealth University and the director of the research incubator for the Center for Clinical and Translational Research. Her research interests include nonlinear regression modeling, categorical data analysis, analysis of complex mixtures, and statistical issues in mixture toxicology, and she has published extensively on these topics. She has a current research project investigating the integration of mixtures toxicology, toxicogenomics, and statistics. She earned her Ph.D. in biostatistics from the Virginia Commonwealth University.

Paul Gilman

J. PAUL GILMAN is the senior vice president and chief sustainability officer of Covanta Energy. He was formerly the director of the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies and served as assistant administrator for Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He also worked at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, where he had oversight responsibilities for the Department of Energy (DOE) and all other science agencies, and at DOE, where he advised the Secretary of Energy on scientific and technical matters. From 1993 to 1998, Dr. Gilman was the executive director of the Life Sciences and Agriculture divisions of the National Research Council (NRC). He serves as a member of the NRC Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology. Dr. Gilman earned his Ph.D. degrees in ecology and evolutionary biology from The Johns Hopkins University.

Russ B. Hauser

RUSSELL HAUSER is a professor of environmental and occupational epidemiology in the Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. From 2000-2004, he served as Deputy Director of the Occupational and Environmental Medicine Residency, NIOSH Education and Research Center. His research focuses on the effects of environmental and occupational chemicals on fertility and pregnancy outcomes. He is conducting an epidemiologic study on the relationship of chlorinated chemicals, pesticides, bisphenol A, and phthalates with male and female reproductive health. Maternal endpoints of interest include infertility and pregnancy outcomes, such as early pregnancy loss, stillbirth, and pre-term birth, and measures of fetal growth, including birth weight. Male endpoints of interest include semen quality and sperm DNA damage and the paternal contribution to adverse pregnancy outcomes. The study is being conducted in collaboration with physicians from the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also conducting a prospective cohort study on children in Chapaevsk, Russia, where he is investigating the relationship of exposure to dioxins and dioxin-like compounds with growth and pubertal development in boys. He recently began a two-state study in collaboration with researchers from Yale University on genetic and environmental risk factors for testicular germ cell cancer. He has served on two Institute of Medicine Committees on Gulf War and Health. He is the medical editor of Environmental Health Perspectives and on the editorial board of the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology and is chair of the Environment and Reproduction Special Interest Group, American Society for Reproductive Medicine. He received an M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an M.P.H. and Sc.D. from the Harvard School of Public Health where he completed a residency in occupational medicine. He is board certified in occupational medicine.

Andreas Kortenkamp

ANDREAS KORTENKAMP is professor and head of the Centre for Toxicology at the University of London. His research focuses on exploring the effects of multi-component mixtures of endocrine active chemicals. The thrust of his work is to assess whether the effects of mixtures of chemicals can be predicted quantitatively on the basis of information about their individual potency. Dr. Kortenkamp’s research interests lie in environmental pollutants that have the potential to cause cancer. More recently, he has concentrated on endocrine active chemicals in the environment and their potential role in the rising incidences of breast cancer and testicular cancer. His earlier work was on the mode of action of chromium (VI) compounds, which are well recognized occupational carcinogens. Dr. Kortenkamp earned his Ph.D. from Bremen University, Germany.

Jeffrey Peters

JEFFREY PETERS is associate professor of molecular toxicology at the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include the roles of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) in the regulation of homeostasis, toxicology, and carcinogenesis with extensive application of null mouse models. The goal of his research is to identify functional roles of the PPARs in the etiology and prevention of carcinogenesis. Dr. Peters is also conducting research to delineate the role of the PPARs in the regulation of homeostasis, including body composition, tissue specific gene expression, serum lipid biochemistry, and atherosclerosis. Results from this research will determine mechanisms that regulate physiological lipid metabolism using different activators reported to interact through PPARs. He earned a Ph.D. in nutrition science from the University of California, Davis.

Donna J. Vorhees

DONNA VORHEES is a principal scientist with the Science Collaborative, where she provides human health risk assessment consulting services for a variety of municipal, federal, and industrial clients. She is also an instructor at the Boston University School of Public Health, where she teaches a course in risk-assessment methods. She has extensive experience in addressing environmental questions arising from multipathway human exposure to chemicals that have been released to indoor and outdoor environments at federal and state hazardous waste sites. Her research interests include development of probabilistic human exposure models; field surveys to collect data needed to support risk assessment; identification of research priorities for improving dredged-material management; and preparation of environmental-health educational materials. Dr. Vorhees conducted probabilistic analyses of multipathway exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in residences near the New Bedford Harbor, MA, Superfund site, to PCBs and pesticides that accumulate in fish from an offshore dredged-material disposal site, and to PCBs, dioxins, and furans that accumulate in agricultural products from the floodplain of a contaminated river. She is an active member of the Society for Risk Analysis and the International Society of Exposure Analysis and served on the National Research Council Committee on Sediment Dredging at Superfund Megasites. Dr. Vorhees earned her Sc.D. in environmental health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Mary S. Wolff

MARY SNOW WOLFF is professor of community and preventive medicine and professor of oncological sciences at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She is also director of the Center for Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research, an NIH/EPA-funded multidisciplinary research program. Her research interests center around application of biological markers to determine exposures of humans to chemicals that occur in the environment. In addition to exogenous agents, environmental exposures are considered in the context of diet, lifestyle, and individual susceptibility factors, and their relationship to cancer risk, to reproductive dysfunction, and to developmental disorders. She has been involved in numerous studies of both occupational and ambient environmental exposures to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, organochlorine pesticides, and polychlorinated biphenyls. She has also investigated lead poisoning, dermal exposures, and chemicals in breast milk. She has collaborated in several studies of breast cancer risk associated with environmental exposures and the genetic determinants of these risks. More recently, she has shifted emphasis to newly identified exposures that may be most relevant to the twenty-first century. Dr. Wolff earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Yale University.

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Health Risks of Phthalates

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Health Risks of Phthalates

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Featured publication

Phthalates and Cumulative Risk Assessment: The Tasks Ahead

Description

Contributors

Committee

Sponsors

Staff

Major units and sub-units

Contact

Contact us

Provide feedback

Request materials

More like this

Review of the draft United by Nature assessment

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

Health Care Financing to Improve Availability of Affordable Contraception: Identifying Promising Practices

National Cooperative Highway Research Program

National Forum on Nature-Based Solutions

Transportation Research Board Executive Office

Meeting of Experts: Discussion of Potential Impacts of the Camp Edwards Multipurpose Machine Gun Range Project on the Cape Cod Aquifer

Public Health Research and Surveillance Priorities from the East Palestine, Ohio Train Derailment: A Workshop

Advances in Multimodal Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Environmental and Biomedical Data Integration-A Workshop