You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Education
PHTHALATES AND HUMAN HEALTH
  1. R Hauser1,
  2. A M Calafat2
  1. 1Department of Environmental Health, Occupational Health Program, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA
  2. 2National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA 30341, USA
  1. Correspondence to:
 Prof. Associate R Hauser
 Occupational Health Program, Harvard School of Public Health, Building 1, Room 1405, 665 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA; rhauserhohp.harvard.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/oem.2004.017590

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    The diesters of 1,2-benzenedicarboxylic acid (phthalic acid), commonly known as phthalates, are a group of man-made chemicals with a wide spectrum of industrial applications (fig 1, table 1). High molecular weight phthalates (for example, di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate [DEHP], di-isononyl phthalate [DiNP], di-n-octyl phthalate [DnOP]), are primarily used as plasticizers in the manufacture of flexible vinyl which, in turn, is used in consumer products, flooring and wall coverings, food contact applications, and medical devices.1–3 Manufacturers use low molecular weight phthalates (for example, diethyl phthalate [DEP] and dibutyl phthalate [DBP]) in personal-care products (for example, perfumes, lotions, cosmetics), as solvents and plasticizers for cellulose acetate, and in making lacquers, varnishes, and coatings, including those used to provide timed releases in some pharmaceuticals.3–5

    View this table:
    • In this window
    • In a new window
    Table 1

     Potential sources of exposure and health effects of selected phthalates

    Figure 1

     Generic chemical structure of phthalates diesters and phthalate monoester metabolites. R is an alkyl and/or aryl group: CH3 (dimethyl phthalate), CH2CH3 (diethyl phthalate), CH2CH2CH2CH3 (dibutyl phthalate), CH2CH(CH2CH3)CH2CH2CH2CH3 (di[2-ethylhexyl) phthalate), CH2CH2CH2CH3 and CH2C6H5 (butylbenzyl phthalate).

    In this paper, we review the uses and metabolism of phthalates, and the studies on health effects of phthalates in human populations published between 1973 and June 2005. The references included in this review were searched using the Web of Science database which provides interactive citation and literature searching of the Institute for Scientific Information’s Science Citation Index Expanded. The database contains data from more than 5000 scientific journals and covers the period from 1980 to present. We also searched the bibliography cited in the selected references for additional relevant citations.

    ROUTES OF EXPOSURE AND METABOLISM

    Because phthalates are widely used in …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Funding: this work was supported in part by grants ES09718 and ES00002 from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH

    • Competing interests: none