Endocrine disruptors: Revisiting concepts and dogma in toxicology

During the last decades, a large number of observations have shown that some exogenous substances could interfere with hormone levels or hormone action and could induce toxic effects. This has led to the identification of endocrine disruptors more than 25 years ago as a new class of toxic agents (Zoeller et al., 2014). Those widely used agents correspond to a variety of chemical classes, are not identified by their chemical structure or by a specific type of usage, but rather by their mechanisms of action; this is not unprecedented in toxicology since genotoxicants have also been identified by their mechanism of action, i.e. their ability to alter DNA structure and function.