Risks of dietary acrylamide exposure: A systematic review

• Only human studies concerning risk of acrylamide (AA) dietary exposure were evaluated.
• A critical comparison of risk associated with the method used to assess AA intake was made.
• Lack of consensus of the studies is inherent to the variations on assessing AA intake.
• Food frequency questionnaires need to be better standardized to assess AA intake.
• AA intake in foods varies widely, which limits the use of food database.

Acrylamide (AA) is a probable human carcinogen found in carbohydrate-rich foods that have been heated to high temperatures. AA dietary exposure has been associated to development of health problems. We perform a systematic review to elucidate the association of dietary AA exposure and human health problems. Articles were screened by reading titles and abstracts before the full text of eligible articles was read (κ = 0.824). Data were harvested by two reviewers and checked by a third. Forty-one articles were analyzed and assessment of dietary exposure proved to be far from uniform and suffered from limitations that possibly impact on the validity of outcomes with relation to human health. Risk assessment of dietary acrylamide exposure is in need of high quality methods for evaluating dietary exposure and validated acrylamide content databases.