Nearly two years ago, the CHE EDCs Strategies Group, coordinated by CHE, TEDX, and HEAL, began organizing this series of monthly conference calls with the goal of “widening the scope” of the public’s understanding of endocrine disruption. There is no better summary document to address that goal than the forthcoming statement from The Endocrine Society (the Executive Summary was published September 28th). The Society, the world’s oldest, largest, and most active organization devoted to research on hormones and the clinical practice of endocrinology published their first scientific statement on endocrine disrupting chemicals in 2009. This second scientific statement, the full version of which will be published online in the journal Endocrine Reviews in October, reviews the science which has emerged in the intervening five years.
According to the Executive Summary, “The past 5 years represent a leap forward in our understanding of EDC actions on endocrine health and disease.”
On this call, the lead author, Professor Andrea Gore, described this landmark statement. Scientific advances over the past 5 years (encompassing 1300 studies) reveal numerous EDC effects on obesity, diabetes, male and female reproduction (including cancer), the prostate and thyroid glands, and neurodevelopment. Learn why the brain is highly vulnerable to EDC exposure, and how the thyroid may be affected without disturbance to thyroid hormone levels.
Conclusions call for educational tools to help health care practitioners serve their patients, and testing tools for regulators to prioritize chemicals and assess hazards. In particular, the authors stress that chemical safety testing should be required before chemicals come to market, given that some chemicals have effects that can persist for generations, even in the absence of exposure.
Featured Speaker
Dr. Andrea Gore is Professor and Vacek Chair in Pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Gore’s NIH-funded research projects are investigating how environmental endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) perturb the developing brain and reproductive systems. She also investigates the effects of estrogen on the aging brain of rodents and monkeys, as a model for menopause in women. Dr. Gore has published 4 books and 140 scientific papers. She is also very active in educating scientists, the media, and the public, about the problems of environmental endocrine disruptors. She organized and chaired the Gordon Research Conference on this topic (2012), as well as the Endocrine Society’s first Forum on Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (2005). Gore was the lead author on a published Scientific Statement on Endocrine Disruptors (Endocrine Reviews, 2009) that was updated in 2015. Dr. Gore has received many awards and honors for her research and teaching accomplishments, including election as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the University Cooperative Society’s 2008 Research Excellence Award. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Endocrine Society’s flagship basic science journal, Endocrinology.
The call was moderated by Elise Miller, MEd, Director of CHE.
This teleconference call is one in a monthly series sponsored by the Collaborative on Health and the Environment’s EDC Strategies Group. The CHE EDC Strategies Group is chaired by Carol Kwiatkowski (TEDX), Sharyle Patton (Commonweal), and Genon Jensen (HEAL). To see a full list of past calls in the series and listen to the MP3 recordings please visit the CHE Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals webpage.