Estimating exposure and dose to characterize health risks: the role of human tissue monitoring in exposure assessment.

Exposure assessment is an integral part of health risk characterization. Exposure assessments typically address three critical aspects of exposure: the number of people exposed to the environmental toxicant, at specific concentrations, for the time period of interest; the resulting dose; and the relative contribution of important sources and pathways to exposure/dose. Because historically both "point-of-contact" measurements and information about dose and related pharmacokinetic processes have been lacking, exposure assessments have had to rely on construction of "scenarios" to estimate exposure and dose. This could change, however, as advances in development of biologic markers of exposure and dose make it possible to measure and interpret toxicant concentrations in accessible human tissues. The increasing availability of "biomarkers," coupled with improvements in pharmacokinetic understanding, present opportunities to estimate ("reconstruct") exposure from measurements of dose and knowledge of intake and uptake parameters. Human tissue monitoring, however, is not a substitute for more traditional methods of measuring exposure, but rather a complementary approach. A combination of exposure measurements and dose measurements provides the most credible scientific basis for exposure assessment.