Risk assessment of acrylamide in foods

Area of Science:

• Toxicology
• Food Safety
• Risk Assessment

Background:

• Acrylamide is a food contaminant found in fried and baked goods, and coffee.
• Rodent studies show acrylamide causes cancer (testicular mesotheliomas, mammary gland adenomas) and initiates skin tumors.
• Acrylamide is metabolized to mutagenic glycidamide and forms hemoglobin adducts in rodents and humans.

Purpose of the Study:

• To estimate the lifetime cancer risk associated with daily acrylamide intake from food.
• To assess the potential health implications of acrylamide exposure in the Norwegian population.

Main Methods:

• Utilized exposure assessment data from a Norwegian study for daily acrylamide intake.
• Employed linear extrapolation methods (LED10, T25) to estimate cancer hazard from rodent data.
• Scaled rodent cancer hazard data to humans and correlated with estimated human exposure levels.

Main Results:

• Estimated daily mean acrylamide intake: 0.49 microg/kg (males) and 0.46 microg/kg (females).
• Calculated a lifetime cancer hazard of 1.3 x 10^-3 for 1 microg/kg/day exposure.
• Estimated lifetime cancer risk for 70 years of daily intake: 0.6 x 10^-3 for males (6/10,000).

Conclusions:

• Daily dietary acrylamide intake may pose a low but quantifiable lifetime cancer risk.
• The risk assessment is conservative; actual risk may be lower due to nonlinear dose-response relationships.
• Further research into acrylamide's genotoxicity and dose-response is warranted.