The hidden health effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals

The quest to understand the adverse health outcomes linked to endocrine-disrupting chemicals continued in 2025. Insights have been gained regarding their effects on metabolic health, their key characteristics, the mechanisms underlying their effects and the burden of disorders associated with exposure to these chemicals in terms of mortality and life-years lost.

Key advances

• A consensus statement defined 12 key characteristics for metabolism-disrupting agents, providing a systematic framework to organize mechanistic data and support the identification of substances that increase the risk of metabolic disorders such as obesity, diabetes mellitus and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease³.

• Bisphenol S was shown to accelerate systemic organ ageing and to affect lifespan by disrupting energy metabolism regulated by brown adipose tissue in animal studies, highlighting brown adipose tissue as a key mediating organ for the effects of bisphenol S⁵.

• Exposure to di-2-ethylhexylphthalate has previously been shown to contribute to metabolic dysfunction and adverse cardiovascular outcomes, causing an estimated 356,238 deaths in 2018 (equating to 13.5% of cardiovascular deaths among individuals aged 55–64 years), with disproportionate effects in South Asia and the Middle East, which highlights the urgent need for global regulation⁶.

• Prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos was associated with alterations in human brain structure, function and metabolism, as well as poor motor performance that continued into late childhood and early adolescence, which suggests lasting neurodevelopmental disturbances⁸.