如今,人类在日常生活中接触到许多化学物质,包括对羟基苯甲酸酯,UV过滤器,磷阻燃剂/增塑剂,双酚,邻苯二甲酸酯和替代增塑剂,会对人类健康产生不同的不良影响。估计人类暴露于这些潜在有害物质是,因此,最重要的。人类生物监测(HBM)是评估暴露于环境污染物的现有方法,其依赖于来自个体的生物基质中的特定人类生物标志物(母体化合物和/或其代谢产物)的分析。主要缺点是它的实现,这涉及复杂的队列研究。一种新颖的方法,废水流行病学(WBE),涉及通过分析污水中的生物标志物(整个人群的尿液和粪便样本)来估计暴露。WBE的关键挑战之一是选择特定于人类代谢的生物标志物,排出足够的量,在污水中稳定。到目前为止,有关估计这些化学物质暴露的潜在生物标志物的文献数据分散在许多药代动力学和HBM研究中。因此,本综述提供了30多种广泛使用的化学品暴露的潜在生物标志物列表,并报告了它们的尿排泄率.此外,通过对先驱WBE研究的回顾,讨论了WBE在这一特定领域的潜力和挑战,首次探索了这种新颖方法评估人类暴露于环境污染物的适用性。在未来,WBE可能被用作“预警系统”,这可以及时识别暴露于环境污染物最多的社区。
Humans are nowadays exposed to numerous chemicals in our day-to-day life, including parabens, UV filters, phosphorous flame retardants/plasticizers, bisphenols, phthalates and alternative plasticizers, which can have different adverse effects to human health. Estimating human\'s exposure to these potentially harmful substances is, therefore, of paramount importance. Human biomonitoring (HBM) is the existing approach to assess exposure to environmental contaminants, which relies on the analysis of specific human biomarkers (parent compounds and/or their metabolic products) in biological matrices from individuals. The main drawback is its implementation, which involves complex cohort studies. A novel approach, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), involves estimating exposure from the analysis of biomarkers in sewage (a pooled urine and feces sample of an entire population). One of the key challenges of WBE is the selection of biomarkers which are specific to human metabolism, excreted in sufficient amounts, and stable in sewage. So far, literature data on potential biomarkers for estimating exposure to these chemicals are scattered over numerous pharmacokinetic and HBM studies. Hence, this review provides a list of potential biomarkers of exposure to more than 30 widely used chemicals and report on their urinary excretion rates. Furthermore, the potential and challenges of WBE in this particular field is discussed through the review of pioneer WBE studies, which for the first time explored applicability of this novel approach to assess human exposure to environmental contaminants. In the future, WBE could be potentially applied as an \"early warning system\", which could promptly identify communities with the highest exposure to environmental contaminants.