FORUM Risk Assessment of Acrylamide in Foods

Daily mean intakes of acrylamide present in foods and coffee in a limited Norwegian exposure assessment study have been esti-mated to be 0.49 and 0.46 g per kg body weight in males and females, respectively. Testicular mesotheliomas and mammary gland adenomas have consistently been found in 2-year drinking water rat cancer studies with acrylamide. Acrylamide also shows initiating activity in mouse skin after systemic administration. Since acrylamide is converted to the mutagenic metabolite glycid-amide and forms adducts to hemoglobin in rodents and humans, the tumorigenic endpoints in rats were assumed to be an expres-sion of acrylamide genotoxicity. Using the default linear extrapo-lation methods LED10 and T25, the lifetime cancer hazard after lifelong exposure to 1 g acrylamide per kg body weight per day, scaled to humans, was calculated to be, on average, 1.3 10–3. Using this hazard level and correlating it with the exposure esti-mates, a lifetime cancer risk related to daily intake of acrylamide in foods for 70 years in males was calculated to be 0.6 10–3, implying that 6 out of 10,000 individuals may develop cancer due to acrylamide. For females, the risk values were slightly lower. It must be emphasized that this risk assessment is conservative. A number of processes may result in nonlinearity of the dose-re-sponse relationships for acrylamide carcinogenicity in the low-dose region, including detoxication reactions, cell cycle arrest, DNA repair, apoptosis, and immune surveillance. Thus, the true risk levels related to acrylamide intake may be considerably lower. Key Words: acrylamide; food exposure; risk assessment; cancer