To Örebro University

The general public is continuously exposed to a wide range of environmental pollutants. This thesis focuses on a group of anthropogenic chemicals referred to as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that have been linked to various adverse health effects in humans.

The main objective of this thesis was focused on the development and application of high-throughput methods for analysis of a broad range of chlorinated, brominated, and fluorinated POPs in human blood.

After establishing that the methods were effective, the two methods were applied to human plasma samples to examine the background levels of a broad range of POPs in human plasma samples among elderly men and women from Sweden and to assess the influence of gender. Levels of a wide range of chlorinated, brominated, and fluorinated compounds were determined in plasma samples collected during 2001-2004 from 1, 016 (50.2% women) 70 year-old participants from the population-based Prospective Study of the Vasculature in Uppsala Seniors (PIVUS). The POPs studied were 16 polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), 5 organochlorine pesticides (OCPs), 1 dioxin, 1 brominated flame retardant as well as 14 perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) including structural perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) isomers. The majority of the studied compounds were detected in the 70-100% of the participants. The structural PFOS isomers were successfully quantified in a sub-sample of 25 men and women. Furthermore, gender differences in the concentrations of the POPs studied showed that the majority of chlorinated and brominated compounds were significantly different when comparing men and women in the study, while the concentrations of the fluorinated compounds were found to be less influenced by gender.

This thesis has, by using the developed high-throughput methods requiring only small amounts of human blood, provided background exposure information of a broad range of POPs for an epidemiological study.