Abstract
Psychosocial stress has been consistently linked with alterations in immune, endocrine, and metabolic function, and growing evidence indicates that psychosocial stressors—including noise, poverty, and exposure to violence—may alter human susceptibility to environmental chemical exposures. As a result, there is a growing need for methods to disentangle patterns in chemical and non-chemical exposures and to quantify their independent and interacting effects on health.
Here, a framework is presented for integrating psychosocial stressors into a traditional risk assessment approach, with attention to exposure assessment for non-chemical stressors and to statistical methods for incorporation of very disparate exposures into a risk assessment. Finally, an illustrative case example is presented, to demonstrate an approach for incorporating a psychosocial stressor (here, exposure to violence, a key stressor in urban U.S. communities) into a cumulative risk assessment aiming to quantify air pollution effects on health.
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Clougherty, J.E., Levy, J.I. (2018). Psychosocial and Chemical Stressors. In: Rider, C., Simmons, J. (eds) Chemical Mixtures and Combined Chemical and Nonchemical Stressors. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56234-6_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56234-6_17
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