Toxicological and Exposure Database Inventory: A review

Abstract

Background: Knowledge of hazards and exposure data about chemical pollutants are essential for epidemiological studies for assessing health risks and preventing the development of diseases. Access to this type of information is clearly needed and although numerous databases (DBs) have been compiled, they are often extremely difficult to find and navigate.

Objectives: This paper presents the creation of an online inventory of toxicological and exposure DBs to support human health risk assessment resulting from the chemical exposome.

Methods: A free searchable online inventory, called TEDI (Toxicological and Exposure Database Inventory), was set up to collect meta-data on toxicological and exposure DBs resulting from a review of the literature conducted on PubMed. Only chemical agents, including drugs, natural and manufactured/synthetic chemicals and air pollutants, were considered. Regarding exposure DBs, only human exposure to chemicals were included. Because of time and resource constraints, only an inventory was performed, and no effort was made to rate, assess or rank DBs on quality criteria.

Results: A total of 715 DBs were identified, catalogued, described and made available on TEDI. The number of chemicals ranged from one single chemical to 90 million for toxicological DBs and from 1 to 103,817 chemicals for exposure DBs. Some DBs were restricted to specific chemicals, with for instance 71 exposure DBs reporting polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon measurements. Toxicological DBs (n = 362) provided a broad range of different information such as toxicity data (57%), physicochemical properties (38%), experimental study results (28%) or prediction data (16%). A total of 382 exposure DBs were found, including exposure measurements DBs (71%), web application/tool (21%), exposure and risk assessment models (19%) and epidemiological DBs (13%).

Discussion: TEDI is of value to the broader community and could support human health risk assessment to chemicals in various contexts. This inventory remains open for further additions, to enlarge its coverage, increase the meta-data collected and include newly developed DBs.

Keywords: Chemical exposome; Exposure database; Health risk assessment; Inventory; Toxicological database.