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Review
. 2022 Mar 13;19(6):3362.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph19063362.

Human Biomonitoring Data in Health Risk Assessments Published in Peer-Reviewed Journals between 2016 and 2021: Confronting Reality after a Preliminary Review

Tine Bizjak  1   2 , Marco Capodiferro  3 , Deepika Deepika  4 , Öykü Dinçkol  5   6 , Vazha Dzhedzheia  7 , Lorena Lopez-Suarez  8 , Ioannis Petridis  7 , Agneta A Runkel  1   2 , Dayna R Schultz  7   9 , Branko Kontić  1
Affiliations
Review

Human Biomonitoring Data in Health Risk Assessments Published in Peer-Reviewed Journals between 2016 and 2021: Confronting Reality after a Preliminary Review

Tine Bizjak et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Human biomonitoring (HBM) is a rapidly developing field that is emphasized as an important approach for the assessment of health risks. However, its value for health risk assessment (HRA) remains to be clarified. We performed a review of publications concerned with applications of HBM in the assessment of health risks. The selection of publications for this review was limited by the search engines used (only PubMed and Scopus) and a timeframe of the last five years. The review focused on the clarity of 10 HRA elements, which influence the quality of HRA. We show that the usage of HBM data in HRA is limited and unclear. Primarily, the key HRA elements are not consistently applied or followed when using HBM in such assessments, and secondly, there are inconsistencies regarding the understanding of fundamental risk analysis principles and good practices in risk analysis. Our recommendations are as follows: (i) potential usage of HBM data in HRA should not be non-critically overestimated but rather limited and aligned to a specific value for exposure assessment or for the interpretation of health damage; (ii) improvements to HRA approaches, using HBM information or not, are needed and should strictly follow theoretical foundations of risk analysis.

Keywords: exposure assessment; health risk assessment; human biomonitoring; review.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Documents by year for two types of searches using keywords on Scopus: “human biomonitoring” and “human biomonitoring” and “risk assessment” [20,21].
Figure 2
Figure 2
PRISMA flow diagram.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Potential uses of human biomonitoring in the health risk assessment context.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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