Application of systematic evidence mapping to identify the potential human health hazards of azo dyes
On this page:
Systematic evidence mapping (SEM) provides a transparent and methodologically rigorous approach for compiling the available evidence to assess potential human health hazards. Azo dyes are a group of organic compounds widely used in textiles, leather clothing, and other products such as food coloring, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics. Some of these dyes are known to be mutagenic and carcinogenic. The main goal of this SEM is to identify and categorize the available toxicological data, with a particular focus on skin and respiratory sensitization, mutagenicity, and carcinogenicity for a set of 30 azo dyes related to textile and/or leather products. These azo dyes were selected initially based on annual production/import volume in the European Union. We identified over 20,000 studies by literature searches of various databases. This set was filtered using evidence stream tags (human, animal, in vitro) in the SWIFT Review software application, yielding 12,800 unique records. Following title/abstract and full text screening using SWIFT Active (a machine-learning software application) and DistillerSR, we identified 187 studies that met populations, exposures, comparators, and outcomes (PECO) criteria. From this pool, human (54), animal (78), and genotoxicity (61) studies were extracted into a literature inventory to capture and categorize important study details such as the type of genotoxicity studies to facilitate more efficient and targeted evaluation for future human health assessments of this complex chemical class of azo dyes.