Patlewicz G, Worth AP, Yang C, Zhu T. 2022. Editorial: Advances and refinements in the development and application of threshold of toxicological concern. Front Toxicol 4(Apr 28):882321; doi: 10.3389/ftox.2022.882321.
Abstract
The Threshold of Toxicological Concern (TTC) is an exposure threshold below which there is no appreciable risk to human health. There are two main approaches: TTC values based on cancer potency data from which a one in a million excess lifetime risk is estimated and TTC values based on non-cancer effects. For the latter approach, a distribution is typically fitted to the No Observed Adverse Effect Levels (NOAELs) from repeat dose toxicity studies from which a 5th percentile value is taken and adjusted using an uncertainty factor (usually this is 100). Established TTC values are those based on oral chronic studies that were first developed by Munro et al. (1996) who subcategorised chemicals into one of three Cramer structural classes (Cramer et al., 1978). Kroes et al. (2004) presented a tiered TTC approach that established several human exposure thresholds spanning four orders of magnitude where the lowest TTC was for substances presenting structural alerts for genotoxicity (0.15 μg/d), to the next tier for organophosphates/carbamates (18 μg/d) and the remaining higher TTC values representing the same three Cramer classes originally derived by Munro et al. (1996). The World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) (European Food Safety Authority and World Health Organization, 2016; EFSA et al., 2019) have determined that the TTC approach is a sound and fit-for-purpose risk assessment tool, with a number of caveats, in cases where chemical-specific repeat dose toxicity data are not available.