Expected Achievements

It is a high priority to establish if the health benefits attributed to marine food is compromised by high levels of chemical pollutants. From a nutritional point of view, marine food is considered valuable because of its high content of polyunsaturated fatty acids, selenium and other micronutrients. Unfortunately, marine food is in particular susceptible to pollution by chemical compounds because of the bioaccumulation and biomagnification taking place in the marine food chain. The answer to this question has implications for all European people and in particular for people who’s lives are based on seafood.
This project includes people with the highest body burden of biopersistent organochlorines in the world and implements reliable and sensitive measures of male, female and neonatal reproductive toxicity. This enhances the opportunity to corroborate or reject the hypothesis postulating adverse reproductive effects of these widespread dietary contaminants. If no effects are found in these series of studies, the results will be reassuring in the majority of European populations with lower dietary intake of biopersistent organochlorines.
On the other hand, if an impact on reproductive health is revealed by consistent results across populations and in stand-alone studies, the study design enables exposure-response evaluations and the identification of possible no-effect thresholds. Therefore, an important achievement is a direct contribution to risk assessment and consequently provide a rational basis for risk management at the community as well as the individual level.
The successful completion of this study provides unique data in support of or against the hypothesis that prenatal exposure to xenohormones is disrupting reproductive health (the “estrogen hypothesis”). This is because some biopersistent organochlorines have hormone-like actions. Hereby the results will have general scientific value reaching further knowledge on possible reproductive effects of biopersistent organochlorines.
This study takes advantage of reliable biological measures of exposure and the so far largest database of biopersistent organochlorine levels in humans will be established to reach the objectives of this project. The biopersistent organochlorines
CB-153 and DDE will be measured in some 4000 persons.