Zum Stichprobenfehler im Human-Biomonitoring

Goal and Scope

Human biomonitoring determines the concentration of xenobiotics in populations by means of smaller samples, thus necessarily arising sampling errors. These are determined.

Methods

For a fictitious population of 200,000 persons, differently broad xenobiotic concentration distributions were simulated. Samples of varying size were randomly drawn and the sampling error, defined as the proportional difference between the geometric means of sample and population, was determined.

Results and Conclusions

The sampling error depends on the sample size and the width of the concentration distribution; its estimation is possible for any xenobiotic, given it has lognormal distribution, and the sample size is between 10 and 50,000. For its estimation an equation was derived.

Outlook

When presenting and interpreting results of human biomonitoring, the sampling error must be considered, together with the uncertainty of the measurement.