Current Issues in Developmental Immunotoxicity

Developmental immunotoxicity (DIT) occurs when early-life events reshape immune development to the point of altering immune system responses, often with negative consequences for an organism. Within the vein of toxicology, such events include exposure to exogenous risk factors, including chemical, biological, or physical agents that change the course of immune system development. Early-life exposure to such events may result in suppression, hyperactivation , and/or misregulation of a host of immune responses to result in inflammatory diseases, allergy and asthma, autoimmune diseases, and/or decreased resistance to infectious agents. This chapter will review current issues associated with DIT, including an overview of current guidelines for assessing DIT in experimental animal models, lifetime health risks thought to be associated with DIT, the need for DIT testing in safety assessments of chemical substances, and the impacts of “twenty-first century toxicology” on DIT approaches and methods.