ArticleEnvironmental science & technology2025
Historical Blood Serum Samples from Wilmington, North Carolina: The Importance of Ultrashort-Chain Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances.
Article in Environmental science & technology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Exposure Duration Shapes the Hepatic Response to GenX: Divergent Acute and Chronic Transcriptomic Profiles Reveal Non-Monotonic Dose Effects and Increased Sensitivity in Human Liver Spheroids.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Is drinking water with low PFAS a significant source of human exposure? Evidence summary.Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · 2026Review
- Urine-to-Blood Partitioning of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances in Human Biomonitoring: Implications for Environmental Exposure Analysis and Bioaccumulation Assessment.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Environmental PFOA Exposure Alters Early Developmental Programming during the Maternal-Zygotic Transition.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The maternal-to-zygotic transition is a critical window for PFOA-induced disruption of developmental programming.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
From 1980 to 2017, Wilmington, North Carolina (NC), residents unknowingly consumed high levels of PFAS through drinking water. Some of these PFAS are expected to have short biological half-lives, and current biological sampling will miss these exposures. To assess historical PFAS exposures, we (1) determined PFAS levels in serum samples of Wilmington, NC residents obtained during the years 2010-2016, (2) examined temporal trends of serum PFAS over this period, and (3) associated serum PFAS levels with PFAS concentrations in drinking water. We quantified 56 PFAS, including ultrashort-chain PFAS, in 119 adult human serum samples and 47 PFAS in water samples from 2017. Twenty PFAS were detected in >50% of serum samples; perfluoromethoxyacetic acid (PFMOAA) and trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) exhibited the highest median concentrations (PFMOAA: 42 ng/mL; TFA: 17 ng/mL). PFMOAA and TFA were also the dominant PFAS in Wilmington drinking water, accounting for 95% of quantifiable PFAS. The serum-to-water ratio was linearly correlated with "effective" PFAS chain length, indicating that PFAS with longer chain length and a sulfonic acid group are more bioaccumulative. While chain length is important for bioaccumulation, this study highlights that exposures to high concentrations of ultrashort-chain PFAS in drinking water contribute to their dominance in human serum.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.