Complex chemical mixtures: Approaches for assessing adverse human health effects

In this opinion, we provide a brief overview of three main approaches for assessing effects of chemical mixtures on human health, such as experimental or theoretical component-based or whole mixture studies. We compare the purposes, pros, and cons of the approaches and highlight the recent advances within the field that focus on “real-life” exposures for risk-assessing chemical mixtures. Whole mixture studies combined with effect-directed analysis have been used mostly within ecotoxicology and less so within human toxicology, opening the potential for the determination of mixture drivers in human tissues. Concerning the implementation of mixture risk assessment in legislation, we discuss whether a data-driven factor, for example, a mixture driver factor for each chemical or chemical class could be useful when deriving the toxicologically acceptable limit.