Emerging Risk Issues

TERA stays at the cutting edge of developing issues. For example, current work projects address novel techniques realted to modeling chemical mixtures, assessment issues for human variability in sensitivity, and methods to address complex temporal exposure patterns. 


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Expertise:

Assessing and Characterizing Children's Risk

 

    Children are not simply small adults.  Assessments considering children need to consider differences in anatomy, physiology and chemical toxicokinetics and toxicodynamics.


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Expertise:

     

     

     

     


Assessing and Characterizing Children's Risk

 

    Children are not simply small adults.  Assessments considering children need to consider differences in anatomy, physiology and chemical toxicokinetics and toxicodynamics.


    Key questions for considering children’s risk include:

     

    - How should risk assessors consider risk to children in developing risk values and   considering environmental and consumer product exposure?

    - Are children more sensitive than adults?  Under what conditions?

     

    Example projects include:

     

    - Together with collaborators (Krishnan and Gentry), developed a framework for evaluating the magnitude of adult-to-child toxicokinetic differences in the inhalation dosimetry of gases

    - Published on age-related differences in toxicokinetics and chemical sensitivity, and how these differences are taken into account in the current risk assessment paradigm (Dourson et al., 2002; Scheuplein et al., 2002).

    - To help address differences in tissue dose to children and adults for a given environmental exposure, TERA (together with Environ) collected physiological parameters for neonatal animals for use in PBPK modeling (Gentry et al., 2005).  These data can be used to develop age-specific models to improve estimation of risk to children.