Epigenotoxicity of Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals Makes Inroads to a Paradigm Shift in the Risk Assessment of Pesticides

The most ferocious chronic effect a pesticide could have is disrupting the functions mediated by the endocrine system. When this happens during early development of the life cycle, it leads to profound and lasting adverse human-health and wildlife effects. These effects may not only stop at interrupting some plain physiological functions, but could also play havoc with the epigenetic machinery regulating DNA-transcription in exposed individuals. Even worse is that this havoc and its supervened epigenotoxic effects could be stably transmitted to descendants without further exposing them to the same pesticide or changing their ancestral DNA base sequences. In this manuscript the author reviews the literature with the aim of building a case around the expandable risk posed by Endocrine-Disrupting Pesticides (EDPs); a risk beyond their traditionally-assumed or regulatory-promulgated safety measures. The fact that some EDPs elicit their endocrine-mediated effects at doses far below their acceptable daily intake (ADI) destroys our confidence in the current safety thresholds of human exposure and environmental contamination proclaimed for these pesticides. It seems that the precautionary principle of ‘reasonable certainty of no harm' for EDPs is only a lip-serviced phrase that has no practical value, especially in long terms, due to the possible transgenerational epigenotoxicity caused by these pesticides. The most important message of this review is that the effects of EDPs and their possible epigenetic inheritance significantly amplify the negative impacts and health hazards of these pesticides and require a paradigm shift from the traditional risk assessment approach to a one that includes evidence-based epigenotoxicology (EBE).