Ph.d.-vejledning: Adverse health effects following residential high-level exposure to semi-volatile biphenyls in indoor air

Description

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are biopersistent industrial toxicants that have accumulated environmentally within the past 60 years. Recently it was iscovered that large numbers of citizens worldwide have been and still are exposed to semi-volatile PCBs evaporating from building materials in private homes and schools. Current knowledge on long-term health effects of exposure to PCBs do not allow for appropriate risk assessment of indoor air exposure. This is because PCBs released from indoor sources have a high content of lower chlorinated and semi-volatile PCBs that are mostly non-dioxin-like. As current risk paradigms on PCB rely entirely on the dietary sources and dioxin-like PCB congeners, there is a current gap in knowledge on long-term health effects following airborne PCB
exposure in homes and schools.
The aim of this PhD project is to unravel whether high-level exposure to indoor PCB released from building materials at the Danish residence is associated with increased risk of cancer in terms of breast cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and malignant melanoma, cardiovascular diseases, Type-II Diabetes and cognitive disorders. The study builds on an already established cohort comprising all residents in the Farum Midtpunkt and Brøndby Strand buildings in the period 1970 to 2015. In total, 37,185 people are included in the cohort, of which 5,992 has been living in PCB contaminated apartments as measured by the Danish Building Research Institute (SBi), Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, Bispebjerg Hospital, and Golder Associates. This enables comparisons of high- and low level exposed populations with balanced socioeconomic and geographic position. An individual estimate of long-term airborne PCB exposure will be assigned based on measurements. The cohorts will be linked to different national registries, from where data on cancer, cardiovascular diseases, Type-II Diabetes and cognitive disorders and different covariates such as socioeconomic position, ethnicity, and marital status will be extracted. This proposal builds on a dataset, which will be one of the first human studies of the longterm health effects of the lower chlorinated, semi-volatile PCBs in the indoor environment.

Period	3 Sept 2018 → 11 Nov 2022
Held at	Arbejds- og Miljømedicinsk Afd., BBH. Danmark., Denmark
Degree of Recognition	National