A scoping review of evaluations of and recommendations for default uncertainty factors in human health risk assessment.

ABSTRACT: Uncertainty factors (UFs) are used to account for uncertainties and variability when setting exposure limits or guidance values. Starting from a proposal of a single UF of 100 to extrapolate from an animal NOAEL to a human acceptable exposure, the aspects of uncertainty and number of UFs have diversified and today there are several risk assessment guidelines that contain schemes of default UFs of varying complexity. In the present work, we scoped the scientific literature on default UFs to map developments regarding recommendations and evaluations of these. We identified 91 publications making recommendations for one or several UFs and 55 publications evaluating UFs without making explicit recommendations about numerical values; these were published between 1954 and 2021. The 2000s was the

SUBMITTER: Johanson G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10087398 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature