Asian Americans have significantly higher exposure to cancer-linked “forever chemicals” than any other ethnic or racial group in the country, a new study has found.
By accounting for different sources of community contact with toxic PFAS — such as varying diets and behaviors — Mount Sinai researchers determined that median exposure levels of Asian Americans were 88.5 percent higher than those of non-Hispanic white Americans.
“These disparities are hidden if we use a one-size-fits-all approach to quantifying everyone’s exposure burden,” lead author Shelley Liu, an associate professor of population health science at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, said in a statement.
The findings, published Thursday in Environmental Science and Technology, are the first to account for the complex ways in which different groups of people encounter these compounds when calculating an individual’s overall “exposure burden.”
Exposure burden to PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated substances, is defined as a person’s cumulative exposure to these synthetic compounds, of which there are thousands of types.
Known for leaching into drinking water supplies and soil from industrial waste streams and certain types of firefighting foam, PFAS are also present in a variety of household products.
Scientists have linked exposure to these long-lasting compounds to many illnesses, including thyroid disease, kidney cancer and testicular cancer.
To probe potential exposure differences among ethnic and racial groups, Liu and her colleagues used advanced psychometric and data science methods called “mixture item response theory.”
These methods — typically used in psychology literature, such as personality evaluations and assessments of risky behaviors — enabled the researchers to uncover hidden subpopulations that differ in exposure patterns.
The scientists then applied their methods to existing PFAS biomonitoring data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which contains participant blood levels of various types of the substances from 2013 through 2018.
They ultimately found that differences in PFAS sources, including foods and occupational habits, could be responsible for the discrepancies in exposure burdens among communities.
In contrast to the heightened amount of PFAS exposure in Asian Americans, the authors observed that Mexican Americans and other Hispanic Americans respectively had 88.5 percent and 30.8 percent lower median burdens compared with non-Hispanic white Americans.
The researchers found no significant difference in median exposure burdens of non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white individuals, according to supplementary data accompanying the study.
Not only did the scientists identify differences based on ethnicity and race, but they also found that individuals with greater household incomes also had higher PFAS burden scores.
While the comparatively high burden for Asian Americans remained consistent across both low- and middle-income strata, there were no appreciable differences among the wealthiest groups, the study determined.
Although the authors did not identify specific reasons as to why Asian Americans might have greater exposure to PFAS in comparison to other ethnic and racial groups, they stressed the importance of continuing to account for these disparities.
“In order to advance precision environmental health, we need to optimally and equitably quantify exposure burden to PFAS mixtures, to ensure that our exposure burden metrics used are fair and informative for all people,” Liu said.