Wristband Personal Passive Samplers and Suspect Screening Methods Highlight Gender Disparities in Chemical Exposures

Wristband personal samplers enable human exposure assessments
for
a diverse range of chemical contaminants and exposure settings with
a previously unattainable scale and cost-effectiveness. Paired with
nontargeted analyses, wristbands can provide important exposure monitoring
data to expand our understanding of the environmental exposome. Here,
a custom scripted suspect screening workflow was developed in the
R programming language for feature selection and chemical annotations
using gas chromatography–high-resolution mass spectrometry
data acquired from the analysis of wristband samples collected from
five different cohorts. The workflow includes blank subtraction, internal
standard normalization, prediction of chemical uses in products, and
feature annotation using multiple library search metrics and metadata
from PubChem, among other functionalities. The workflow was developed
and validated against 104 analytes identified by targeted analytical
results in previously published reports of wristbands. A true positive
rate of 62 and 48% in a quality control matrix and wristband samples,
respectively, was observed for our optimum set of parameters. Feature
analysis identified 458 features that were significantly higher on
female-worn wristbands and only 21 features that were significantly
higher on male-worn wristbands across all cohorts. Tentative identifications
suggest that personal care products are a primary driver of the differences
observed.