Impact of refining the assessment of dietary exposure to cadmium in the European adult population

Abstract

Exposure assessment constitutes an important step in any risk assessment of potentially harmful substances present in food. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) first assessed dietary exposure to cadmium in Europe using a deterministic framework, resulting in mean values of exposure in the range of health-based guidance values. Since then, the characterisation of foods has been refined to better match occurrence and consumption data, and a new strategy to handle left-censoring in occurrence data was devised. A probabilistic assessment was performed and compared with deterministic estimates, using occurrence values at the European level and consumption data from 14 national dietary surveys. Mean estimates in the probabilistic assessment ranged from 1.38 (95% CI = 1.35–1.44) to 2.08 (1.99–2.23) µg kg^–1 bodyweight (bw) week^–1 across the different surveys, which were less than 10% lower than deterministic (middle bound) mean values that ranged from 1.50 to 2.20 µg kg^–1 bw week^–1. Probabilistic 95th percentile estimates of dietary exposure ranged from 2.65 (2.57–2.72) to 4.99 (4.62–5.38) µg kg^–1 bw week^–1, which were, with the exception of one survey, between 3% and 17% higher than middle-bound deterministic estimates. Overall, the proportion of subjects exceeding the tolerable weekly intake of 2.5 µg kg^–1 bw ranged from 14.8% (13.6–16.0%) to 31.2% (29.7–32.5%) according to the probabilistic assessment. The results of this work indicate that mean values of dietary exposure to cadmium in the European population were of similar magnitude using determinist or probabilistic assessments. For higher exposure levels, probabilistic estimates were almost consistently larger than deterministic counterparts, thus reflecting the impact of using the full distribution of occurrence values to determine exposure levels. It is considered prudent to use probabilistic methodology should exposure estimates be close to or exceeding health-based guidance values.

Keywords:

• cadmium
• probabilistic assessment
• left-censored data
• occurrence
• consumption survey

Acknowledgements and disclaimer

The authors are grateful to Stefanie Vandevijvere (Institute of Public Health, Belgium), Inge Tetens (National Food Institute, Denmark), Carolin Krems (Max-Ruben Institute, Germany), Rosa Maria Ortega Anta (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain), Jean-Luc Volatier (French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety, France), Joseph Shavila (Food Standards Agency, UK), Christina Tlustos (Food Safety Authority, Ireland), Aida Turrini (National Research Institute for Food and Nutrition, Italy), Gatis Ozoliņš (Food Center of Food and Veterinary Service, Latvia), Marga Ocké (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands), Suvi Virtanen (National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland), Anna Karin Lindroos (National Food Agency, Sweden), and Jiri Ruprich (National Institute of Public Health, Czech Republic) for providing to EFSA the food consumption data used in the paper. They also acknowledge all the European countries that provided occurrence data for cadmium in food. The authors Arcella, Cappe and Heraud are employed with the EFSA in its Dietary and Chemical Unit which provides scientific and administrative support to EFSA’s scientific activities in the area of exposure assessment. At the time the authors’ contribution to the present article was drafted the authors Ferrari and Fabiansson were employed at EFSA. However, the article is published under the sole responsibility of the authors and may not be considered as an EFSA scientific output. The positions and opinions presented here are those of the authors alone and not intended to represent the views or scientific works of EFSA. For the views or scientific outputs of EFSA, see http://www.efsa.europa.eu/.