Overview of meta-analyses on health effects of phthalates extracted from scientific literature

A search for meta-analyses related to phthalate exposure resulted in 268 hits in PubMed (2025). From these, 74 were selected based on the title and categorized following different outcomes assessed. The search was supplemented with a few findings from the umbrella reviews from Symeonides et al. (2024) on the health effects of plastics and additives (search until the year 2020) and from Eales et al. (2022). The following data was extracted from each meta-analysis: DOI, author, meta-analysis (yes/no), outcome group (e.g. cardiometabolic), outcome specific (e.g. diabetes mellitus), study population, exposure (phthalate or metabolite), metabolite, exposure window, number of studies in the meta-analysis, effect measure, effect size, upper and lower CI on effect size, significance (yes/no) and additional remarks. These data can be found in the Excel spreadsheet.