The quality of exposure assessment is a major determinant of the overall quality of any environmental epidemiology study. The use of biomonitoring as a tool for assessing exposure to ubiquitous chemicals with short physiologic half-lives began relatively recently. These chemicals present several challenges, including their presence in analytical laboratories and sampling equipment, difficulty i...

Abstract A framework of "Common Criteria" (i.e. a series of questions) has been developed to inform the use and evaluation of biomonitoring data in the context of human exposure and risk assessment. The data-rich chemical benzene was selected for use in a case study to assess whether refinement of the Common Criteria framework was necessary, and to gain additional perspective on approaches fo...

BACKGROUND Exposure assessment has shifted from pollutant monitoring in air, soil, and water toward personal exposure measurements and biomonitoring. This trend along with the paucity of health effect data for many of the pollutants studied raise ethical and scientific challenges for reporting results to study participants. METHODS We interviewed 26 individuals involved in biomonitoring studi...

Bioethical principles are widely used as a normative framework in areas of human research and medical care. In recent years there has been increasing formalization of their use in public health decisions. The "traditional bioethical principles" are applied in this discussion to the important issue human biomonitoring for environmental exposures. They are: (1) Autonomy--Also known as the "respec...

Within the last decade, the comet assay has been used with increasing popularity to investigate the level of DNA damage in terms of strand breaks and alkaline labile sites in biomonitoring studies. The assay is easily performed on WBCs and has been included in a wide range of biomonitoring studies of occupational exposures encompassing styrene, vinyl chloride, 1,3-butadiene, pesticides, hair dy...

OBJECTIVES Concerns on climate change are leading to the renaissance of wood burning and particulate exposures. Levoglucosan is used as a marker of woodsmoke in air and urine. OBJECTIVES Contribution of data on urinary excretion of levoglucosan, to improve biomonitoring and source apportionment of woodsmoke. MATERIALS AND METHODS 1, 3, 5, and 7 hours after 5 mg of levoglucosan had been admi...

For epidemiologic studies that evaluate the relation between potential exposures to environmental chemicals and adverse outcomes, accurate assessments of exposures and health outcomes are needed. Three prospective cohort studies recently evaluated the relation between exposure, as assessed by biomonitoring, of pregnant women to organophosphorus pesticides and several birth outcomes. Here these ...

rd HJ. Reverse dosimetry: interpreting trihalomethanes biomonitoring data using physiologically based pharmacokinetic modeling. Use of a physiologically based pharmacokinetic model to identify exposures consistent with human biomonitoring data for chloroform. et al. Bladder cancer and exposure to water disinfection by-products through ingestion, bathing, showering, and swimming in pools. AD. Th...

Wireless biomonitoring, first used in human beings for fetal heart-rate monitoring more than 30 years ago, has now become a technology for remote sensing of patients' activity, blood pulse pressure, oxygen saturation, internal pressures, orthopedic device loading, and gastrointestinal endoscopy. Technical advances in miniaturization and wireless communications have enabled development of monito...

Biomonitoring ecosystems is necessary in order to evaluate risks and efficiently manage their associated services. Agrosystems are the target of multiple stressors that can affect many species through effects cascading along food webs. However, classic biomonitoring, focused on diversity or indicator species, might be a poor predictor risk such whole-ecosystem perturbations. Thanks high-through...