Summary

Humans are exposed throughout their lifetime to a large variety of compounds that are foreign to the human body. These so-called xenobiotics include industrial, consumer, and environmental chemicals and, in most cases, need to be converted into more water-soluble metabolites in order to be excreted from the body in the urine and/or feces. This process is known as biotransformation and usually results in the detoxification of the compounds metabolized. However, biotransformation may also lead to the formation of metabolites having increased therapeutic or toxic effects. This process is often referred to as bioactivation and may be explained either as enhanced activity or affinity of a metabolite towards an enzyme or receptor compared to the parent compound, or it may be seen as a process in which the metabolite becomes more toxic by for example its chemical reactivity which can lead to covalent binding to DNA, adduct formation to proteins or the formation of reactive oxygen species [1]. The endocrine system is one of the body’s two major communication systems and has been shown to be susceptible to toxic effects of xenobiotics. Substances capable of disrupting the endocrine system are defined as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) an