central nervous systems

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other public health agencies are concerned that the environmental health of America?s growing population of older adults has not been taken into consideration in current approaches to risk assessment.

The reduced capacity to respond to external stressors that characterizes aging suggests that exposures that induce adaptive responses in young adults may yield toxicological responses in older adults.

Accumulating evidence from recent environmental health studies has raised concerns over the environmental etiology of diseases of aging.

For decades chlorpyrifos (CPS) has been one of the most widely used organophosphate insecticides for a variety of agricultural and public health applications.

The extensive use of CPS inevitably results in exposure to a small number of the human population. It is believed that the chemical is metabolically oxidized to its oxygen analog, chlorpyrifos oxon (CPO), which can cause acute toxicity in humans by the inhibition of acetylcholinesterase in the central nervous systems.

The metabolical oxidization of CPS to CPO primarily occurs in livers by multiple cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzyme isoforms.