Quantitative analysis of the minimum days of dietary survey to estimate dietary pesticide exposure: Implications for dietary pesticide sampling strategy

Populations are exposed to pesticides through diet on a daily basis. However, there is no research guiding how to evaluate dietary pesticide exposure, and researchers used 1-day, 3-days, 7-days or even longer dietary survey to evaluate without any consensus. It is important for dietary pesticide evaluation to identify the minimum survey days. To increase knowledge of this, a data combination was applied between a two-wave consecutive repeated-measures study in Baoding City and the Fifth China Total Diet Study. Further policy consistency on pesticides were evaluated to explain its credibility. We computed the sensitivity and specificity to evaluate how well different days of dietary survey classify participants with high exposure, and calculated the minimum days required to estimate the participant-specific mean at different acceptable error range. With 1 day of dietary survey, the classification sensitivity was low (<0.6) for total HCH, endosulfan, chlordane, cyhalothrin, allethrin, and prallethrin; that for the other pesticides was high sensitivity (≥0.6). Sensitivity increased as the number of days increased, and the maximum marginal sensitivity increase (≥0.039) occurred from 1 to 2 days for all pesticides except phenothrin, whose maximum marginal sensitivity increase (0.042) occurred from 2 to 3 days. The specificity increased gradually from 0.8 to 0.9 from 1 to 7 days. Under the acceptable error range of 0.5%, 3–28 days were required for participant-specific mean estimation and 1–7 days were required when acceptable error range was shrunk in 1%. Only 1 day was enough if 5% error range was acceptable. In conclusion, 3 days in the study period was cost-effective to distinguish high exposure group, and it rose to 7 when estimating participant-specific mean from a conservative perspective. This study can serve as a reference to determine the minimum survey days for epidemiological studies employing dietary surveys.