Department of Preventive Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York 10029, USA.
Curr Opin Pediatr. 2013 Apr;25(2):261-7. doi: 10.1097/MOP.0b013e32835e9084.
Accurate prenatal exposure assessment is one of the major challenges in environmental epidemiologic studies. Variations in placental transport make maternal biospecimens unreliable for many chemicals and fetal specimens collected at birth do not provide information on exposure timing over the prenatal period.
The skeletal compartment is an important chemical repository, making calcified tissues important for measuring exposure. For decades teeth have been used to estimate long-term cumulative exposure to metals and some organic chemicals. Recently developed methodologies that combine sophisticated histological and chemical analysis to precisely sample tooth layers that correspond to specific life stages have the potential to reconstruct exposure in the second and third trimesters of prenatal development and during early childhood.
Such a retrospective biomarker that precisely measures exposure intensity and timing during prenatal development would substantially aid epidemiologic investigations, particularly case-control studies of rare health outcomes.
准确的产前暴露评估是环境流行病学研究的主要挑战之一。胎盘转运的差异使得母体生物样本对于许多化学物质不可靠，而出生时采集的胎儿样本则无法提供关于产前时期暴露时间的信息。
骨骼组织是一种重要的化学储存库，因此钙化组织对于测量暴露非常重要。数十年来，牙齿一直被用于估计金属和某些有机化学物质的长期累积暴露。最近开发的结合了复杂组织学和化学分析的方法，能够精确地对对应特定生命阶段的牙齿层进行采样，从而有可能重建妊娠第二和第三 trimester 以及儿童早期的暴露情况。
这种能够精确测量产前发育期间暴露强度和时间的回溯性生物标志物将极大地辅助流行病学研究，特别是罕见健康结果的病例对照研究。
