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Abstract Background The suspected or actual effects on health of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDC) and their ubiquitous presence in everyday life justify the implementation of health promotion interventions. These interventions should ideally be applied during critical windows like pregnancy. Perinatal environmental health education interventions may help to reduce EDC exposure during pregnancy. Methods/design PREVED (Pregnancy, PreVention, Endocrine Disruptors) is an open-label randomized controlled trial assessing the impact of environmental health education intervention on EDC exposure during pregnancy. Inclusion, consent, and randomization take place during the first trimester. The participants are randomly allocated into three groups: (i) control group (information leaflet on EDCs), (ii) intervention group in neutral location (information leaflet and workshops in a meeting room), and (iii) intervention group in contextualized location (information leaflet and workshops in a real apartment). Workshops are organized between the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. Main outcome is the percentage of participants who reported consuming manufactured/industrial food. Secondary outcomes are as follows: (i) psycho-social dimensions, (ii) EDC concentrations in urine, (iii) EDC concentration in colostrum, and (iv) percentage of participants who reported consuming paraben-free personal care products. Discussion PREVED is a ground-breaking intervention research project dedicated to perinatal environmental health education that aims to identify pollutant sources in daily life and to offer accessible and realistic alternative solutions, by promoting the sharing of know-how and experience in a positive and non-alarmist approach. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov : NCT03233984 (current status: ongoing). Retrospectively registered on 31 July 2017 ( https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03233984 ) because when the first participant was enrolled in this non-drug intervention, ClinicalTrials.gov was centered in therapeutic trials. The World Health Organization Trial Registration Data Set is in Additional file 1.

Bisphenols and parabens are endocrine disruptors families widely used in daily life. They are known to be linked to numerous pathologies such as reproductive disorders, obesity, breast cancer, hypertension and asthma. Biomonitoring is an essential tool for assessing population exposure to environmental pollutants. Blood and urine are the main matrices used in human biomonitoring. However, they are not suitable to evaluate long-term exposure to endocrine disruptors with a short elimination half-life such as parabens or phenols. Hair appears to be an interesting alternative matrix allowing a wide window of exposure due to an accumulation of xenobiotics during hair growth. This study presents the development and validation of a high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry for the simultaneous determination of bisphenol A, its chlorinated derivatives, bisphenol F, bisphenol S and parabens in human hair. An optimised sample preparation based on acidic hydrolysis followed by liquid-liquid extraction was performed, before an analysis by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry in multiple reaction monitoring mode. To validate the method, recognized bioanalytical guidelines were used and calibration and quality control samples were prepared in human hair samples. Linearities were over 0.996 in the whole range of concentrations. Trueness and precision were demonstrated for each target analyte with intra-day and inter-day bias values ranging from 86 % to 118 % and relative standard deviation values ranging from 0 % to 19 %. At the same time, limits of quantification were set at 0.25 ng/g for bisphenol A and parabens, 0.05 ng/g for bisphenols F and S and 0.00625 ng/g for the chlorinated derivatives of bisphenol A. This reliable method was applied to hair samples taken from hospital professionals and allowed the quantification of these endocrine disruptors in this population. Chlorinated derivatives of bisphenol A were quantified here in hair for the first time.

The health safety conditions governing the practice of online hemodiafiltration (OL-HDF) do not yet incorporate the risks related to the presence of endocrine disruptors such as bisphenol A (BPA). The aim of this study was to assess, for the first time, the exposure to BPA but also to its chlorinated derivatives (ClxBPA) (100 times more estrogenic than BPA) during OL-HDF. We demonstrated that BPA is transmitted by the different medical devices used in OL-HDF: ultrafilters, dialysis concentrate cartridges (and not only dialyzers, as previously described). Moreover, BPA has been found in dialysis water as well as in ultrapure dialysate and replacement fluid due to contamination of water coming from municipal network. Indeed, due to contaminations provided by both ultrafilters and water, high levels of BPA were determined in the infused replacement fluid (1033 ng.L−1) from the beginning of the session. Thus, our results demonstrate that dialysis water must be considered as an important exposure source to endocrine disruptors, especially since other micropollutants such as ClxBPA have also been detected in dialysis fluids. While assessment of the impact of this exposure remains to be done, these new findings should be taken into account to assess exposure risks in end-stage renal disease patients.