Dose-response relationship

The dose–response relationship, or exposure–response relationship, describes the change in effect on an organism caused by differing levels of exposure (or doses) to a stressor (usually a chemical) after a certain exposure time, or to a food. This may apply to individuals (e.g.: a small amount has no significant effect, a large amount is fatal), or to populations (e.g.: how many people or organisms are affected at different levels of exposure).

Studying dose response, and developing dose–response models, is central to determining "safe", "hazardous" and (where relevant) beneficial levels and dosages for drugs, pollutants, foods, and other substances to which humans or other organisms are exposed. These conclusions are often the basis for public policy.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has developed extensive guidance and reports on dose-response modeling and assessment, as well as software.

Dose–response relationships generally depend on the exposure time and exposure route (e.g., inhalation, dietary intake); quantifying the response after a different exposure time or for a different route leads to a different relationship and possibly different conclusions on the effects of the stressor under consideration. This limitation is caused by the complexity of biological systems and the often unknown biological processes operating between the external exposure and the adverse cellular or tissue response.

A dose–response curve is a simple X–Y graph relating the magnitude of a stressor (e.g. concentration of a pollutant, amount of a drug, temperature, intensity of radiation) to the response of the receptor (e.g. organism under study). The response may be a physiological or biochemical response, or even death (mortality), and thus can be counts (or proportion, e.g., mortality rate), ordered descriptive categories (e.g., severity of a lesion), or continuous measurements (e.g., blood pressure). A number of effects (or endpoints) can be studied, often at different organizational levels (e.g., population, whole animal, tissue, cell).

The measured dose (usually in milligrams, micrograms, or grams per kilogram of body-weight for oral exposures or milligrams per cubic meter of ambient air for inhalation exposures) is generally plotted on the X axis and the response is plotted on the Y axis. Other dose units include moles per body-weight, moles per animal, and for dermal exposure, moles per square centimeter. In some cases, it is the logarithm of the dose that is plotted on the X axis, and in such cases the curve is typically sigmoidal, with the steepest portion in the middle. Biologically based models using dose are preferred over the use of log(dose) because the latter can visually imply a threshold dose when in fact there is none.

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