The researchers detected more than 50 new environmental chemicals lurking in people’s bodies, the vast majority of which are little-known or unknown compounds.
These chemicals – which have never been seen in people before – were discovered in a study of pregnant women and their newborns.
The findings are worrisome, given that very little is known about these chemicals and their potential health effects, say the researchers in the new study. Furthermore, pregnant women and their newborns are a particularly vulnerable population.
Related: What are PFAS?
“We are very concerned about these exposures that occur during pregnancy because it is a very vulnerable development period,” said the study’s senior author, Tracey Woodruff, director of the Reproductive Health and Environment Program (PRHE) and Environmental Research and Translation for the Health (EaRTH) Center, both at the University of California San Francisco. “It can influence the health of the mother later. And it is a vulnerable period of development for the fetus, so it can have consequences for childhood and for life.”
Of these recently detected chemicals, two were perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. These chemicals, used in consumer products like nonstick pans and pizza boxes, remain in the human body for a long time and can accumulate, according to the Environmental Production Agency (EPA). Ten of the recently detected substances were plasticizers or chemicals used in the production of plastics. For example, one of the detected plasticizers, a group of chemicals called phthalates, are often found in fast-food packaging and have been linked to adverse health effects. Two of the recently detected chemicals are used in cosmetics; one on pesticides.
But the majority – 37 – of these recently detected chemicals are those about which researchers have little or no information, the authors wrote in the study, published Tuesday (March 16) in the newspaper Environmental Science and Technology.
Mysterious chemists
even though pregnancy being a vulnerable development period, there is a lack of data on chemicals to which mothers and fetuses are potentially exposed, due in part to a lack of methods to detect these chemicals, Woodruff told Live Science. Current methods for monitoring human exposure to chemicals typically involve screening only a few hundred of about 8,000 chemicals produced or imported into the United States each year, the authors wrote in the study.
For this study, the researchers recruited 30 pregnant women seeking prenatal and childbirth care at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and UCSF Mission Bay Medical Center. Blood samples were collected from the mother during labor and delivery and from the cord umbilical cord (cord blood) shortly after birth.
The researchers then analyzed the blood samples using a relatively new technique called high-resolution mass spectrometry, which involves determining the different masses of the compounds to identify them. In this way, they were able to take pictures of almost all the chemicals present in blood samples from mothers and their newborn babies, said study co-author Dimitri Abrahamsson, a postdoctoral fellow at PRHE. “This allowed us, in the end, to find evidence of some chemicals that seem not to have been previously detected in people,” he added. participated in the study.
The researchers identified 109 chemicals present in maternal blood and umbilical cord samples, including 55 that had never been found in people before. Others detected in the samples, such as phthalates, have already been found in humans and have been associated with adverse health effects, such as reproductive problems. The researchers also detected the two most studied PFAS, known as PFOA and PFOS, in maternal and neonatal samples. PFAS and PFOA have been shown to cause developmental, hepatic, renal and immunological problems in laboratory animals and have also been linked to several health problems in epidemiological studies in humans, according to the EPA.
The researchers found traces of such chemicals in mothers and babies, said Woodruff. “This is a very important feature of this, because it shows that these exposures are also occurring in the womb,” said Woodruff.
The umbilical cord, which connects the placenta to the fetus, is the channel through which oxygen and other nutrients pass between the mother and the fetus. If a chemical is present in the umbilical cord blood, the fetus has been exposed to it, said Woodruff. Further research is needed to determine whether these specific chemicals are also present in fetal tissues and at what levels; however, previous studies have found that chemicals detected in cord blood also appear in fetal tissue, said Woodruff.
Because so little is known about these recently detected chemicals, including where mothers may have been exposed to them, it is unclear what the potential effects on their health may be, the researchers told Live Science. This should signal not a feeling of uncertainty, but “alarm”, said Abrahamsson. “We are being exposed to chemicals about which we have very little information. And these chemicals can have harmful health effects that we don’t know about and cannot predict,” he said.
Researchers can determine whether these chemicals are present in maternal and umbilical cord blood, but cannot say at what levels, Woodruff said. For this reason, researchers cannot say whether the chemicals detected are dangerous at the levels at which they are present in mothers and babies.
But that does not necessarily mean that there is no reason to worry about the adverse health effects of chemical exposures, added Woodruff. “We already know from other studies that pregnant women are exposed to chemicals, many of them at levels that have been associated with adverse health effects”, such as phthalate exposure associated with problems with male reproductive development, she said. “Those [newly detected] chemicals add to chemicals that we know are linked to adverse health outcomes. “
In the future, Woodruff said, the researchers plan to study the toxicities of these newly detected chemicals in the human body and learn how the chemicals affect various tissues with the long-term goal of using the information to prevent adverse diseases and illnesses. Researchers also need to confirm the identities of the new chemicals by comparing them, again using mass spectrometry, with “analytical standards” or pure samples of each chemical, the researchers said.
For consumers, researchers have created Some tips on how to avoid exposure to substances that can be harmful to reproductive health, including cleaning with non-toxic products, using less plastics and avoiding canned foods.
Originally published on Live Science.