Identifying dietary and daily product-use patterns explaining joint variation in multiple urinary phthalate metabolites via sparse reduced-rank regression

Background

Phthalates are synthetic plasticizers widely used in consumer and industrial products, resulting in widespread human exposure and potential adverse reproductive, neurodevelopmental, and metabolic effects. However, the relative contributions of diverse lifestyle-related sources to the overall phthalate burden remain unclear. In this study, we aimed to identify dietary and daily product use factors most prominently associated with joint variations in urinary phthalate metabolite mixtures in a nationally representative sample of Korean adults.