Health Risk Assessment of Volatile Organic Compounds

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) encompass a diverse group of carbon-based chemicals that readily evaporate at ambient temperature. Emitted from sources such as vehicle exhaust, industrial processes, solvents and combustion, these compounds pose both acute and chronic health risks. Assessment frameworks typically adopt a four-step approach: hazard identification, exposure assessment, dose–response evaluation and risk characterisation. Hazard identification emphasises the carcinogenic and non-cancer effects of key VOCs such as benzene, formaldehyde and toluene. Exposure assessment now integrates personal monitoring, remote sensing and advanced dispersion models to estimate ambient and indoor concentrations across populations. Dose–response evaluation draws on experimental toxicology and epidemiological studies to establish reference values for chronic and acute endpoints. Risk characterisation combines exposure estimates with toxicity metrics, producing hazard quotients for non-cancer effects and lifetime cancer risk probabilities for carcinogens. Recent advances address mixture toxicity and vulnerable populations, employing multivariate statistical methods and mechanistic modelling to prioritise compounds and sources. This global perspective underpins regulatory policies and community interventions, guiding emission controls, indoor air standards and public health advisories. The evolving methodologies support evidence-based decision-making to mitigate VOC-related health burdens worldwide.

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Health Risk Assessment of Volatile Organic Compounds publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in health risk assessment of volatile organic compounds across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs): Carbon-based chemicals that evaporate at ambient conditions.

Hazard Quotient (HQ): Ratio of estimated exposure to a reference dose for non-cancer effects.

Lifetime Cancer Risk (LCR): Probability of developing cancer over a lifetime due to exposure to a carcinogen.

Carcinogenic Equivalence Factor (CEF): Weighting metric comparing a compound’s cancer potency to that of a reference standard.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA): Multivariate statistical technique that reduces data dimensionality to identify key contributing factors.

References

1. Multivariate analysis of carcinogenic equivalence (CEQ) to characterize carcinogenic VOC emissions in a typical petrochemical industrial park in Taiwan. Environment International (2024).
2. One-third of global population at cancer risk due to elevated volatile organic compounds levels. npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (2024).
3. Health risk assessment of volatile organic compounds exposure near Daegu dyeing industrial complex in South Korea. BMC Public Health (2018).