MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Amina Salamova PhD School of Public and Environmental Affairs and School of Public Health Indiana University Bloomington Bloomington, Indiana MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Dr. Salamova: Flame retardants are industrial chemicals that are added to a wide variety of commercial and consumer products to slow the spread of fire and delay ignition. These chemicals are used in electronics, furniture, building insulation, textiles, and many other products.  While flame retardants serves a purpose of saving lives in the case of fire, the extensive use of these chemicals has resulted in a widespread environmental contamination.  These chemicals can escape the products in which they are used by evaporation or weathering off of the product. Flame retardants have been found in indoor and outdoor air, water, soil and sediment, plants, animals and people around the world. There is some evidence that some of the chemicals are toxic. Number of toxicological reports suggest that these chemicals are toxic to our reproductive and neurological systems and that exposure to these chemicals is associated with learning disabilities, obesity, and endocrine disruption. Despite these findings there are still many unknowns about the adverse health effects of these chemicals on human health. Large and long-term biological monitoring programs are needed, in which large populations are monitored in terms of exposure to these chemicals. However, one of the difficulties in conducting long-terms biomonitoring programs is the lack of an easy, convenient, and cost-effective biological marker of exposure.  Biological marker of exposure is a measurement of a specific chemical or its metabolite in a specific tissue in the human body, which accurately reflects the level of exposure to the chemical of interest. Conventionally, most of the studies on flame retardants in human tissues have focused on measurements in milk, blood and urine. But using these tissues is either limited in terms of population, or collection – the tissues are invasive or complicated to collect. In fact these problems are often cited as common reasons for people’s refusal to participate in the study and donate tissues. This is especially significant for the most vulnerable populations, such as children, pregnant women and elderly. This is important, because it has been shown that children are at higher risk of exposure to flame retardants as concentrations found in children’s blood are higher than those found in adults. Clearly, there is a need to find a convenient noninvasive biomarker of exposure to flame retardants and that was the goal of this study. The discovery of an easily available biomarker should ease the way for further research to determine the human impact of these chemicals commonly found in the environment. Human hair and nails are good examples of noninvasive biomarkers. Compared to other tissues, these samples are easy to collect. Collection is also less expensive – anyone can do it at home. In fact, that is what we asked the participants in our study to do – they collected nails at home and mailed the samples to us. Also, these matrices are stable, so you don’t need anything special for their transport to the lab and storage. These are slowly growing tissues, thus they can provide information on both past and present exposure. In order to examine hair and nails as biomarkers of exposure to flame retardants, we collected hair, fingernail, toenails, and blood samples (simultaneously) from 50 residents of Bloomington, Indiana, mostly students. We wanted to know if we would be able to see any flame retardants in hair and nails, and if the levels in these samples would be correlated with the levels in blood.  (more…)