New strategies for assessing exposure to endocrine disruptor's rapid elimination by analysis of non-invasive biological samples

Human exposure to endocrine disruptors (ED) such as bisphenol A, phthalates and pesticides represents one of the main public health issues raised over the last decade because 1) ED exposure potentially concerns the entire population of developed countries with diet among the prominent routes of exposure, and 2) because knowledge on large-scale health outcomes remains highly insufficient. Awareness of the adverse biological effects associated with these compounds, which have been demonstrated within several cell culture and animal models, and evidence of endocrine activity led to their classification as endocrine disruptors (ED). The study of the health effects associated with these ED in human however remains complex due to their fast elimination from the body through urine, the main biological matrix used for assessing exposure to these compounds. Such fast kinetics result in high variability in urinary concentration of ED, making irrelevant exposure assessment based on a single sample analysed per individual. The NoStra project aims at overcoming these limitations in developing novel biomonitoring strategies based on a)the use of hair analysis, which already provided promising results with other families of contaminants, b)the optimization of urine sampling strategies, and c)the development of multi-matrices approaches. In a second step, the project aims at developing a model for the quantitative determination of the level of exposure of human to ED based on their concentration in hair. This model will be derived from an animal model adjusted to account for interspecies differences in ED metabolism (pharmacokinetics as correction factors). The scientific advances reached within this project should have significant impact in terms of public health, in particular on risk assessment and on the study of health adverse effects associated with exposure to fast-elimination endocrine disruptors.