Development of a marker of estrogenic exposure in human serum

The deleterious, disruptive effects of estrogen mimics on the endocrine system were discovered after the compounds were released into the environment. Their chemical structure does not obviously resemble that of steroid hormones; hence, their estrogenic effects were totally unexpected. In addition to occupational exposures, environmental estrogens may have played a role in decreasing the quantity and quality of human semen during the last 50 years and in increasing the incidences of testicular cancer and cryptorchidism in men and breast cancer in women and men in industrialized countries. Testing the environmental estrogen hypothesis will require developing appropriate biomarkers of exposure and measuring these biomarkers at developmental points where exposure is critical. We report the ongoing development of a method to extract and separate xenoestrogens from ovarian estrogens with human serum as a source, followed by determination of xenoestrogen concentration by a bioassay. We also critically assess bioassays currently available to measure the cumulative effect of xenoestrogens, e.g., (a) the E-SCREEN assay, which measures the proliferative effect of estrogens on their target cells, and (b) the induction by estrogens of specific gene products, such as progesterone receptor and pS2.