News & Resources

This commentary provides a systematic approach for risk assessors to consider and address exogenous exposures to endogenous or background chemicals “up front” in the problem formulation step in order to make it an integral part of risk assessment, and to effectively engage risk managers and peers early in the process to allow regulatory options to inform the focus and scope of such risk assessments.

The review highlights some of the key discoveries and technological advances that have influenced scientific understanding of chemical carcinogenesis over the last fifty years and provides case studies to demonstrate the utility of these modern technologies in providing a biologically robust evaluation of chemical dose-response for cancer risk assessment.

Given formaldehyde's commercial importance, environmental ubiquity and endogenous production, accurate hazard classification and risk evaluation of whether exposure to formaldehyde from occupational, residential and consumer products causes leukemia are critical.

Twenty-four invited-experts participated with expertise in epidemiology, toxicology, science integration and risk evaluation.

The focus was on potential etiologic relations between environmental chemical exposures and cancer risks.

Formaldehyde is a widely used industrial chemical, a byproduct of combustion, and is generated endogenously. The US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed far lower safety values based, in part, on controversial associations between formaldehyde exposure and increased risk of leukemia.

Several cross-sectional studies of a single population of workers exposed to formaldehyde at one of two factories using or producing formaldehyde–melamine resins in China have concluded that formaldehyde exposure induces damage to hematopoietic cells that originate in the bone marrow.

Numerous contaminants in indoor air and their potential to cause or exacerbate asthma continue to be a subject of public health concern.

DNA-protein crosslinks (DPC) arise from a wide range of endogenous and exogenous chemicals, such as chemotherapeutic drugs and formaldehyde. Importantly, recent identification of aldehydes as endogenous genotoxins in Fanconi anemia has provided new insight into disease causation.

To determine whether the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) suggestion of a persistent increased mortality risk for nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC) in relation to formaldehyde (FA) exposure is robust with respect to alternative methods of data analysis.

In 2013, we proposed a novel bottom-up approach to bounding low-dose cancer risks that may result from small exogenous exposures to chemicals that are always present in the body as a result of normal biological processes.

To evaluate associations between cumulative and peak formaldehyde exposure and mortality from acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and other lymphohematopoietic malignancies.

Formaldehyde is not only a widely used chemical with well-known carcinogenicity but is also a normal metabolite of living cells.

A recently-completed study adds further compelling evidence that the current body of existing mode of action data do not support a causal association between formaldehyde and leukemia.