Trace analysis of endocrine disrupting chemicals for risk assessment to human exposure

It is emphasized that chemicals related to daily life products, including plastic materials in wide industrial and consumer applications, may have some biological toxicity, such as endocrine-disrupting effects. An association between exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals and an increased incidence of human endocrine disease has led to a need for accurate analytical techniques relating the exposure of these compounds to an individual's risk of developing disease. With an understanding of the progressive processes of endocrine-disrupting effects, opportunities for the identification of human exposure of sources and biomarkers reflecting are provided. Therefore, the developments of highly sensitive and reliable analytical methods have been required to evaluate human exposure of the related chemicals for risk assessment. In order to obtain as much information as possible from the limited amount of samples, hyphenated analytical methods for the determination of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, such as bisphenol A, phthalate esters and perfluorochemicals, have been studied by the use of LC/MS and LC/MS/MS. These simple, accurate and reliable methods with high sensitivity have been successfully applied to the trace analysis of biological and environmental samples with the hope of realizing scientific risk assessment of the chemicals derived from daily life products, such as polyp mer plastic materials in human blood and urine.