Aging and Vulnerability to Environmental Chemicals

The world's aging populations, with age-related disorders affecting every organ system, are generating medical care costs rising at an unsustainable rate. Although such disorders are expected, we are now beginning to ask whether exposures to toxic environmental chemicals hasten or account for their onset. This book provides a detailed review of current knowledge about the possible associations between a variety of chemical contaminants and adverse effects later in life. It will serve as a guide to policy decisions about protecting us from chemical exposures that distort the aging process. It provides a guide to current understanding of how our contaminated environment may be influencing the aging process and contains examples of approaches that will help us undertake further research on this topic. It will help alert policy makers to the implications of chemical pollution for aging populations and will help formulate initiatives for environmental protection. The book provides a comprehensive view of how environmental exposures may alter the health of our aging population. For readers engaged in environmental research, or aging research, it will highlight a number of questions that need more attention For other readers, they will learn something about the kind of exposures they should avoid or that they should prompt policy makers to reduce or eliminate.