Appendix D Food Codes for NHANES - OEHHA

Scientific Review PanelSRP Draft Version 2 February,June 2012
individual PAH was higher in mother’s milk of nonsmokers than in smokers. For
example, in column two of Table J.3-4, mother’s milk benzo[b]fluoranthene,
pyrene and anthracene have negative concentration values.
These discrepancies could be due to the natural variation in the ability of
individuals to transfer inhaled PAHs to milk, or as Zaneiri et al. suggested, a
result of greater exposure to certain PAHs in some foods compared to cigarette
smoke. The small sample sets (n=11 for each group of smokers and
nonsmokers) in the Zanieri study are less likely to represent the true mean in the
study population and magnify the large variation in this biological response.
Additional uncertainties in the use of smokers to estimate PAH transfer
coefficients include that fact that lung metabolism may be different in smokers
because of the much higher doses of PAHs that smokers receive relative to
those only exposed in ambient pollution. Cytochrome P-450 enzymes are known
to be induced when exposure is greater and therefore metabolism could be
proportionately greater in smokers. In addition, at higher dose levels some
enzyme systems may become saturated which could alter the pattern of
metabolism.
However, smokers are the best population for estimating PAH Tcos because the
inhalation dose can be separated from background inhalation and dietary
exposure, and the inhalation dose from the cigarettes can be estimated. OEHHA
requested raw data from the investigators for individual women in the study, but
unfortunately, only the summary statistics from the published paper were
available to us.
J-25