Environmental exposure to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and potential contribution to eggshell thinning in birds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abnormally thin eggshells can reduce avian reproductive success, and have caused rapid population declines. The best known examples of this phenomenon are the widespread population crashes in birds, mostly raptors, fish eating birds, and scavengers, caused by the pesticide DDT and its isomers in the 1960s. A variety of other chemicals have been reported to cause eggshell thinning. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which are extensively and increasingly used in human and veterinary medicine, may be one particularly concerning group of chemicals that demonstrate an ability to impair eggshell development, based both on laboratory studies and on their known mechanism of action. In this review, we outline environmental and wildlife exposure to NSAIDs, describe the process of eggshell formation, and discuss pathways affected by NSAIDs. We list pharmaceuticals, including NSAIDs, and other compounds demonstrated to reduce eggshell thickness, and highlight their main mechanisms of action. Dosing studies empirically demonstrated that NSAIDs reduce eggshell thickness through cyclooxygenase inhibition, which suppresses prostaglandin synthesis and reduces the calcium available for the mineralization of eggshell. Using the US EPA's CompTox Chemicals Dashboard, we show that NSAIDs are predicted to strongly inhibit cyclooxygenases. NSAIDs have been observed both in the putative diet of scavenging birds, and we report examples of NSAIDs detected in eggs or tissues of wild and captive Old World vultures. We suggest that NSAIDs in the environment represent a hazard that could impair reproduction in wild birds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".