Humans are nowadays exposed to numerous chemicals in our day-to-day life, including parabens, UV filters, phosphorous flame retardants/plasticizers, bisphenols, phthalates and alternative plasticizers, which can have different adverse effects to human health. Estimating human’s exposure to these potentially harmful substances is, therefore, of paramount importance. Human biomonitoring (HBM) is the existing approach to assess exposure to environmental contaminants, which relies on the analysis of specific human biomarkers (parent compounds and/or their metabolic products) in biological matrices from individuals. The main drawback is its implementation, which involves complex cohort studies. A novel approach, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), involves estimating exposure from the analysis of biomarkers in sewage (a pooled urine and feces sample of an entire population). One of the key challenges of WBE is the selection of biomarkers which are specific to human metabolism, excreted in sufficient amounts, and stable in sewage. So far, literature data on potential biomarkers for estimating exposure to these chemicals are scattered over numerous pharmacokinetic and HBM studies. Hence, this review provides a list of potential biomarkers of exposure to more than 30 widely used chemicals and report on their urinary excretion rates. Furthermore, the potential and challenges of WBE in this particular field is discussed through the review of pioneer WBE studies, which for the first time explored applicability of this novel approach to assess human exposure to environmental contaminants. In the future, WBE could be potentially applied as an “early warning system”, which could promptly identify communities with the highest exposure to environmental contaminants.

如今，人类在我们的日常生活中暴露于多种化学物质，包括对羟基苯甲酸酯，紫外线过滤剂，磷阻燃剂/增塑剂，双酚，邻苯二甲酸酯和其他增塑剂，它们可能对人体健康产生不同的不利影响。因此，评估人类对这些潜在有害物质的暴露至关重要。人类生物监测（HBM）是评估暴露于环境污染物中的现有方法，该方法依赖于对个体生物基质中特定人类生物标志物（母体化合物和/或其代谢产物）的分析。主要缺点是其实施，涉及复杂的队列研究。一种新颖的方法，基于废水的流行病学（WBE），涉及通过对污水中的生物标志物（整个人群的尿液和粪便样本）进行分析来估算暴露程度。WBE的主要挑战之一是如何选择对人体新陈代谢具有特异性的生物标记物，这些生物标记物应以足够的量排泄并在污水中稳定。到目前为止，有关大量生物动力学和HBM研究的文献均散布着潜在的生物标志物，以估计这些化学物质的暴露量。因此，本综述提供了暴露于30多种广泛使用的化学品中的潜在生物标记物清单，并报告了其尿排泄率。此外，通过回顾先驱性WBE研究，讨论了WBE在这个特定领域的潜力和挑战，这是第一次探索这种新颖方法在评估人类暴露于环境污染物中的适用性。