Purpose: Increased focus on risk ranking and prioritization of major causes of disease makes it relevant to estimate the impact that exposure to chemical contaminants in foods have on health. We estimated the burden of disease caused by dietary exposure to AA, using disability adjusted life years (DALY) as health metric.
Methods: We focused on cancer as health outcome and proposed a burden of disease model of three components: an exposure-, health-outcome-, and DALY-module. To evaluate the impact of modelling choices in the model components, we estimated disease burden using two approaches for estimating incidence of disease based on quantitative toxicological data, and two approaches for estimating DALY.
Results: Exposure to AA in foods causes 0.18 cancer cases per 100,000 inhabitants and a burden of 1.8 DALY per 100,000 in Denmark each year as estimated by the most conservative approach. We attributed 45-48% of this disease burden to the exposure of AA through intake of fried potato products.
Significance: These results are useful to inform risk management decisions and for comparison with burden of disease of other food-borne hazards. Our study also shows that careful evaluation of methodological choices and assumptions used in burden of disease studies is necessary before use in policy making.