(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018)
Kostoff, Ronald N.
This monograph addresses the effects of toxic stimuli combinations on determination of safe Exposure Limits. It shows these combinations 1) typically lower the threshold constituent exposure levels associated with damage compared to 2) tests of combination constituents run in isolation. The monograph concludes there is no reason to believe today that ANY of the Exposure Limits on potentially toxic stimuli that have been set by ANY of the regulatory agencies are fully protective against serious adverse health effects.
While radiofrequency radiation (RFR) is used for illustrative purposes in a number of the examples presented, the conclusions are applicable to essentially all potential contributing factors to disease amenable to Exposure Limits. RFR combinations are the focal point in Appendix 2, where their potential role in contributing to the national/global opioid epidemic is also discussed.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018)
Kostoff, Ronald N.
Treatment Repurposing is the application of an existing treatment to diseases or symptoms of interest other than the disease(s) or symptom(s) for which the treatment was developed (and used) initially. It includes, but goes well beyond, Drug Repurposing. The present monograph uses Literature-Related Discovery (LRD) to identify treatments that could be repurposed for diseases of interest. The LRD methodology for identifying candidate repurposable treatments is presented in detail, and illustrative examples are provided from a recent monograph on prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's Disease. The present monograph also contains an extensive Bibliography of the core Treatment Repurposing literature, as well as two novel taxonomies of this literature. One taxonomy uses text clustering to display the myriad categories (and their relationships) in this Treatment Repurposing literature, and the other taxonomy uses factor analysis to display the myriad categories/themes in the same literature.
The present monograph examines the differences (for selected toxic substances) between 1) the Federal legally enforceable occupational Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs) set by OSHA and 2) low-level exposures reported in the biomedical literature associated with serious adverse effects. In these selected cases, the PELs are orders of magnitude higher than what the premier biomedical literature would suggest is protective. Our previous monograph on combinations of stressors (https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/59719) concluded that testing of single stressors (the main determinant of myriad types of Exposure Limits), rather than combinations of stressors, greatly under-estimates the toxicity of the stressors in real-world environments. When these 1) stressor combination conclusions are added to the 2) results from the present monograph, one can 3) seriously question whether present-day Exposure Limit regulations offer credible levels of occupational protection from any potentially toxic stressors.