Understanding the psychology of how people make decisions can shed light on important factors contributing to the cause and maintenance of public health problems like obesity. This knowledge can and ...should inform the design of government and private-sector public health interventions. Several insights from psychology and behavioral economics that help explain why people are particularly vulnerable to the current food environment are discussed. These insights fall into the following categories: the influence of starting points (status quo bias and anchoring effects); communicating health information (simplicity and framing); and unintended consequences of policy interventions (compensation, substitution, and the peanuts effect). The paper discusses opportunities for improving the design of food policies and interventions by altering default options, providing the public with simple and meaningful nutrition information, carefully constructing the framing of public health messages, and designing food policies to minimize unintended consequences, such as compensation and substitution.
It is inevitable that, during their use, engineered nanoparticles will be released into soils and waters. There is therefore increasing concern over the potential impacts of engineered nanoparticles ...in the environment on aquatic and terrestrial organisms and on human health. Once released into the environment, engineered nanoparticles will aggregate to some degree; they might also associate with suspended solids, sediment, be accumulated by organisms and enter drinking water sources and food materials. These fate processes are dependent on the characteristics of the particle and the characteristics of the environmental system. A range of ecotoxicological effects have also been reported, including effects on microbes, plants, invertebrates and fish. Although available data indicate that current risks of engineered nanoparticles in the environment to environmental and human health are probably low, our knowledge of the potential impacts of engineered nanoparticles in the environment on human health is still limited. There is therefore a need for continued work to develop an understanding of the exposure levels for engineered nanoparticles in environmental systems and to begin to explore the implications of these levels in terms of the ecosystem and human health. This will require research in a range of areas, including detection and characterization, environmental fate and transport, ecotoxicology and toxicology.
In the same way as medicines are delivered to produce effects in the endocrine system, environmental chemicals can be similarly delivered to produce unwanted endocrine effects, resulting in a ...staggering increase in several diseases. These effects on endocrine and other physiological systems can have significant population-level impacts and thus require public health approaches to disease control.
Human health is dependent upon environmental exposures, yet the diversity and variation in exposures are poorly understood. We developed a sensitive method to monitor personal airborne biological and ...chemical exposures and followed the personal exposomes of 15 individuals for up to 890 days and over 66 distinct geographical locations. We found that individuals are potentially exposed to thousands of pan-domain species and chemical compounds, including insecticides and carcinogens. Personal biological and chemical exposomes are highly dynamic and vary spatiotemporally, even for individuals located in the same general geographical region. Integrated analysis of biological and chemical exposomes revealed strong location-dependent relationships. Finally, construction of an exposome interaction network demonstrated the presence of distinct yet interconnected human- and environment-centric clouds, comprised of interacting ecosystems such as human, flora, pets, and arthropods. Overall, we demonstrate that human exposomes are diverse, dynamic, spatiotemporally-driven interaction networks with the potential to impact human health.
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•Human exposome, including biotic/abiotic exposures, is vast, diverse, and dynamic•Human exposome is influenced by environmental and spatial/lifestyle variables•People can have distinct personalized exposomes, even when geographically close•Human- and environment-related exposures constitute the human exposome cloud
Tracking personal exposure to airborne biological and chemical agents enables construction of an interaction network linking individuals, their geographic locations, and environmental factors, which could have broad implications for human health.
Zinc deficiency affects one-fifth of the world's population and leads to substantial morbidity and mortality. Environmental enteropathy (EE), a subclinical pathology of altered intestinal morphology ...and function, is almost universal among people living in developing countries and affects long-term growth and health. This review explores the overlapping nature of these 2 conditions and presents evidence for their interaction. EE leads to impaired zinc homeostasis, predominantly due to reduced absorptive capacity arising from disturbed intestinal architecture, and zinc deficiency exacerbates several of the proposed pathways that underlie EE, including intestinal permeability, enteric infection, and chronic inflammation. Ongoing zinc deficiency likely perpetuates the adverse outcomes of EE by worsening malabsorption, reducing intestinal mucosal immune responses, and exacerbating systemic inflammation. Although the etiology of EE is predominantly environmental, zinc deficiency may also have a role in its pathogenesis. Given the impact of both EE and zinc deficiency on morbidity and mortality in developing countries, better understanding the relation between these 2 conditions may be critical for developing combined interventions to improve child health.
The effects of thermal discomfort on health and human performance were investigated in an office, in an attempt to elucidate the physiological mechanisms involved. Twelve subjects (six men and six ...women) performed neurobehavioral tests and tasks typical of office work while thermally neutral (at 22°C) and while warm (at 30°C). Multiple physiological measurements and subjective assessment were made. The results show that when the subjects felt warm, they assessed the air quality to be worse, reported increased intensity of many sick building syndrome symptoms, expressed more negative mood, and were less willing to exert effort. Task performance decreased when the subjects felt warm. Their heart rate, respiratory ventilation, and end‐tidal partial pressure of carbon dioxide increased significantly, and their arterial oxygen saturation decreased. Tear film quality was found to be significantly reduced at the higher temperature when they felt warm. No effects were observed on salivary biomarkers (alpha‐amylase and cortisol). The present results imply that the negative effects on health and performance that occur when people feel thermally warm at raised temperatures are caused by physiological mechanisms.
Practical Implications
This study indicates to what extent elevated temperatures and thermal discomfort because of warmth result in negative effects on health and performance and shows that these could be caused by physiological responses to warmth, not by the distraction of subjective discomfort. This implies that they will occur independently of discomfort, i.e. even if subjects have become adaptively habituated to subjective discomfort. The findings make it possible to estimate the negative economic consequences of reducing energy use in buildings in cases where this results in elevated indoor temperatures. They show clearly that thermal discomfort because of raised temperatures should be avoided in workplaces.
Summary Although the mammalian embryo is well protected in the uterus, environmental chemicals, drugs, and maternal nutritional imbalances can interfere with regulatory pathways directing placental ...and embryonic development early in gestation. Embryonic cells are most susceptible to environmental influences during cellular specification and differentiation stages. Because biochemical differentiation precedes morphological outcome often by days, the period of susceptibility to environmental chemicals expectedly precedes visible morphogenic effects. The cellular mechanisms by which drugs and other environmental factors disrupt embryonic development and induce cardiac abnormalities have remained undefined.
Household air pollution from biomass fuel use affects 3 billion people worldwide; however, few studies have examined the relationship between biomass fuel use and blood pressure. We sought to ...determine if daily biomass fuel use was associated with elevated blood pressure in high altitude Peru and if this relationship was affected by lung function. We analyzed baseline information from a population-based cohort study of adults aged ≥ 35 years in Puno, Peru. Daily biomass fuel use was self-reported. We used multivariable regression models to examine the relationship between daily exposure to biomass fuel smoke and blood pressure outcomes. Interactions with sex and quartiles of forced vital capacity were conducted to evaluate for effect modification. Data from 1004 individuals (mean age, 55.3 years; 51.7% women) were included. We found an association between biomass fuel use with both prehypertension (adjusted relative risk ratio, 5.0; 95% confidence interval, 2.6-9.9) and hypertension (adjusted relative risk ratio, 3.5; 95% confidence interval, 1.7-7.0). Biomass fuel users had a higher systolic blood pressure (7.0 mm Hg; 95% confidence interval, 4.4-9.6) and a higher diastolic blood pressure (5.9 mm Hg; 95% confidence interval, 4.2-7.6) when compared with nonusers. We did not find interaction effects between daily biomass fuel use and sex or percent predicted forced vital capacity for either systolic blood pressure or diastolic blood pressure. Biomass fuel use was associated with a higher likelihood of having hypertension and higher blood pressure in Peru. Reducing exposure to household air pollution from biomass fuel use represents an opportunity for cardiovascular prevention.
Animal models of endocrine disruption Patisaul, Heather B.; Fenton, Suzanne E.; Aylor, David
Best Practice & Research Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism,
06/2018, Letnik:
32, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are compounds that alter the structure and function of the endocrine system and may be contributing to disorders of the reproductive, metabolic, neuroendocrine ...and other complex systems. Typically, these outcomes cannot be modeled in cell-based or other simple systems necessitating the use of animal testing. Appropriate animal model selection is required to effectively recapitulate the human experience, including relevant dosing and windows of exposure, and ensure translational utility and reproducibility. While classical toxicology heavily relies on inbred rats and mice, and focuses on apical endpoints such as tumor formation or birth defects, EDC researchers have used a greater diversity of species to effectively model more subtle but significant outcomes such as changes in pubertal timing, mammary gland development, and social behaviors. Advances in genomics, neuroimaging and other tools are making a wider range of animal models more widely available to EDC researchers.
Whilst facing a worldwide fast increase of food and environmental allergies, the medical community is also confronted with another inhomogeneous group of environment-associated disabling conditions, ...including multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, electric hypersensitivity, amalgam disease and others. These share the features of poly-symptomatic multi-organ cutaneous and systemic manifestations, with postulated inherited/acquired impaired metabolism of chemical/physical/nutritional xenobiotics, triggering adverse reactions at exposure levels far below toxicologically-relevant values, often in the absence of clear-cut allergologic and/or immunologic involvement. Due to the lack of proven pathogenic mechanisms generating measurable disease biomarkers, these environmental hypersensitivities are generally ignored by sanitary and social systems, as psychogenic or "medically unexplained symptoms". The uncontrolled application of diagnostic and treatment protocols not corresponding to acceptable levels of validation, safety, and clinical efficacy, to a steadily increasing number of patients demanding assistance, occurs in many countries in the absence of evidence-based guidelines. Here we revise available information supporting the organic nature of these clinical conditions. Following intense research on gene polymorphisms of phase I/II detoxification enzyme genes, so far statistically inconclusive, epigenetic and metabolic factors are under investigation, in particular free radical/antioxidant homeostasis disturbances. The finding of relevant alterations of catalase, glutathione-transferase and peroxidase detoxifying activities significantly correlating with clinical manifestations of MCS, has recently registered some progress towards the identification of reliable biomarkers of disease onset, progression, and treatment outcomes.
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