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front |1 |2 |3 |4 |5 |6 |7 |8 |9 |10 |11 |12 |13 |14 |15 |16 |17 |18 |19 |20 |21 |22 |23 |24 |25 |review |
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The link between
epidemiology and health risk assessment (RA) is essentially the same as discussed here
between toxicology and RA, at least in scope. As a matter of fact, if epidemiologic studies on health effects were ethical and as readily available as animal studies and in vitro assays are, there would be no need to provide this lecture relating RA specifically to toxicology. Nor would there be a need to separate toxicologic experiment from human testing, although clinical trials seem to fall somewhere between these two extremes. We already know from the start that epidemiologic evidence is most direct for RA, but for ethical reasons such is not always attainable. Thus no attempts will be made in the next lecture to contrast epidemiology with toxicology regarding their strengths and limitations in RA. Instead, the discussion in Lecture 4 on epidemiology and RA will be more focused and specific, at the expense of a broader, more general presentation already given in this lecture. Topics to be discussed in Lecture 4 will include: (1) The recent advances in epidemiology that are pertinent to RA; (2) the epidemiologic approaches used to conduct exposure assessment, one of the three subprocesses in RA that by default is outside of general or experimental toxicology; and (3) biomarkers used in epidemiology. The last of these three topics deserves further attention because the use of biomarkers in epidemiology is not only a recent advance, but also a subject related to human exposure assessment. It should also be pointed out again that the topic of human exposure assessment will be further discussed more technically and more extensively in Lectures 7 and 8.
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