Environmental Estrogens | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Environmental Estrogens

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines an environmental endocrine disruptor—the term the Agency uses for environmental estrogens—as "an exogenous agent that interferes with the synthesis, secretion, transport, binding, action, or elimination of natural hormones in the body that are responsible for the maintenance of homeostasis, reproduction, development, and/or behavior." Dr. Theo Colborn, a zoologist and senior scientist with the World Wildlife Fund, and the person most credited with raising national awareness of the issue, describes these chemicals as "hand-me-down poisons" that are passed from mothers to offspring and may be linked to a wide range of adverse effects, including low sperm counts, infertility, genital deformities, breast and prostate cancer, neurological disorders in children such as hyperactivity and attention deficits, and developmental and reproductive disorders in wildlife. Colborn discusses these effects in her 1996 book, Our Stolen Future—co-authored with Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers—which asks: "Are we threatening our fertility, intelligence, and survival?" Some other names used for the same class of chemicals are hormone disruptors, estrogen mimics, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and endocrine modulators.

While EPA takes the position that it is "aware of and concerned" about data indicating that exposure to Environmental endocrine disruptors may cause adverse impacts on human health and the environment, the Agency at present does not consider endocrine disruption to be "an adverse endpoint per se." Rather, it is "a mode or mechanism of action potentially leading to other outcomes"—such as the health effects Colborn described drawing from extensive research of numerous scientists—but, in EPA's view, the link to human health effects remains an unproven hypothesis.

Environmental Estrogens article

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