Pathophysiological Progression and Relationships for Selected Endpoints

Abstract

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Research and Development (ORD), National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA) is currently developing methodologies and information sources to use as guidelines for acute exposure to various compounds, including air toxics. The goal of this project is to identify/categorize toxicological endpoints along a pathophysiological continuum. This will serve as preliminary work for the development of a pathophysiological progression model to characterize toxicity endpoints used in human health assessments. An endpoint is defined in this document as an objective or subjective (e.g. self reported symptoms in a study using human research subjects) measure that serves as an indicator of a response (normal and/or pathological) to chemical/toxicant exposure.