Estimating pesticide dose from urinary pesticide concentration data by creatinine correction in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES-III).

The Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES-III) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded data on the urinary concentrations of 12 chemicals (analytes), which were either pesticides or their metabolites, that represent exposure to certain pesticides, in urine samples collected from 1988 to 1994 from a cohort of 978 volunteer subjects, aged 20-59 years. We have used each subject's urinary creatinine concentration and their individual daily creatinine excretion rate (g/day) computed from their age, gender, height and weight, to estimate their daily excretion rate in microg analyte/kg/day. We discuss the mechanisms of excretion of the analytes and certain assumptions needed to compute the equivalent daily dietary intake (microg/kg/day) of the most likely parent pesticide compounds for each excreted analyte. We used literature data on the average amount of parent compound ingested per unit amount of the analyte excreted in the urine, and compared these estimated daily intakes to the US EPA's reference dose (RfD) values for each of those parent pesticides. A Johnson S(B) distribution (four-parameter lognormal) was fit to these data to estimate the national distribution of exclusive exposures to these 12 parent compounds. Only three such pesticides had a few predicted values above their RfD (lindane 1.6%; 2,4-dichlorophenol 1.3%; chlorpyrifos 0.02%). Given the possibility of a subject's dietary intake of a pesticide's metabolites incorporated into treated food, our results show that few, if any, individuals in the general US population aged 20-59 years and not employed in pesticide application were likely to have exceeded the USEPA RfD for these parent compounds during the years studied.