Herbal supplements are commonly used by patients for various problems. It is a well-known fact that most patients do not tell their physicians about the use of herbal supplements unless they are specifically asked. As a result, sometimes important information regarding drug side effects is missed in history taking. During our literature search, we found several retrospective studies and other m...

Risk characterization involves hazard identification, determination of dose-response relationships, and exposure assessment. Improvement of the risk assessment process requires inclusion of the best available science. Recent findings in the area of dioxin toxicity have led to a major effort to reassess its risk. 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), commonly referred to as "dioxin," is th...

The European Union's REACH regulation has explicit requirements for reproductive and developmental toxicity data on all substances manufactured in or imported into the European Union at > or = 10 metric tons/year. Meeting the data requirements with whole-animal testing could result in the use of almost 22 million vertebrate animals for the registration of existing chemicals and cost up to sever...

Chronic renal failure leads to secondary hyperparathyroidism; the spontaneous evolution of this entity results in high bone remodelling. However, throughout the last decades we have learnt that several medical interventions, particularly those which involve a high degree of aluminium exposure, may change the evolution of secondary hyperparathyroidism, leading to other diseases such as aluminium...

Fish acute toxicity studies are required for environmental hazard and risk assessment of chemicals by national and international legislations such as REACH, the regulations of plant protection products and biocidal products, or the GHS (globally harmonised system) for classification and labelling of chemicals. Alternative methods like QSARs (quantitative structure-activity relationships) can re...

Quantitative structure-property/activity relationships (QSPRs/QSARs) are a tool (in silico) to rapidly predict various endpoints in general, and drug toxicity in particular. However, this dynamic evolution of experimental data (expansion of existing experimental data on drugs toxicity) leads to the problem of critical estimation of the data. The carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, liver effects and ...