Measurement of Urinary Biomarkers of Parabens, Benzophenone-3, and Phthalates in a Belgian Population

Abstract

Parabens, benzophenone-3 (BP3), and phthalates are commonly used as antimicrobial conservator, UV-filter, and plasticizer, respectively, and are thought to exhibit endocrine disrupting properties. These endocrine disrupting activities have been recently assumed to lead to cutaneous malignant melanoma. Humans are exposed to these chemicals through different sources such as food, personal care products, or cosmetics. In this study, we measured urinary levels of 4 parabens, BP3, and 7 metabolites of phthalates in samples collected from 261 participants living in and around Liege (Belgium). The analyses were carried out by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) using isotopic dilution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the urinary levels of these 3 classes of chemicals are reported for the same general population in Belgium. Most of the parabens, the BP3, and all the phthalate metabolites were detected in 82.8 to 100.0% of the samples. For most of these chemicals, the exposure patterns significantly differ not only between children and adults, but also between males and females, especially with higher concentrations of parabens and phthalate metabolites in female and children subjects, respectively.

Temporal variability of urinary concentrations of phthalate metabolites, parabens and benzophenone-3 in a Belgian adult population

“…32 Belgian adults from the general population participating to the previous study (Dewalque et al, 2014a) were asked to provide 11 spot urine samples, collected in polypropylene cups, during 4 months between February and July 2013. The sampling was performed in two phases: firstly, single spot voids were randomly collected each day during a week and were named from D1 to D7.…”

“…The estimations of HI, HQ and EDI have already been thoroughly detailed elsewhere (Dewalque et al, 2014b) and are summarized in Table S1. (Dewalque et al, 2014a(Dewalque et al, , 2014cHornung and Reed, 1990). All statistical analyses were performed on log 10 -transformed values to better approximate a normal distribution.…”

“…The aim was to compare the reproducibility of the biomarker concentrations over a week against over several months. Furthermore, we estimated the variance components covering a larger group of individuals in order to better represent the between-subject variability (Hauser et al, 2004) by including the biomarker results of the 261 Belgian participants recruited during a previous study (Dewalque et al, 2014a). The comparison between two ICC was performed with chi-square test with one degree of freedom and was computed as follows (Hankinson et al, 1995):…”

“…As previously mentioned , the drawback of this analysis is that the observed and predicted values are not independent. To overcome this limitation, we calculated for each surrogate sample a specific GM excluding this spot on one hand, and on the other hand, we performed the sensitivity analysis with tertile cut points obtained during a previously reported study on a Belgian general population (Dewalque et al, 2014a). In order to investigate the potential improvement in exposure ranking using multiple spot samples, sensitivity analyses were also performed using surrogate samples calculated as the mean of 2, 3 or 4 spots (Hauser et al, 2004), representing approximately more than 1700, 5200 and 10,500 different possible associations between predicted and observed values respectively.…”

“…However, since human exposure occurs daily, the question of the temporal representativeness of the urinary biomarker measurements could be raised (Dewalque et al, 2014a). To provide an answer, several studies have been carried out to assess the within-person variability of phthalates, parabens and BP3 biomarkers (Hauser et al, 2004;Smith et al, 2012;Teitelbaum et al, 2008;Frederiksen et al, 2013;Koch et al, 2014;Fromme et al, 2007).…”