Organophosphate Pesticide Exposure and Neurodevelopment in Young Mexican-American Children

By B. Eskenazi, A. Marks, A. Bradman, K. Harley, D. Barr, Caroline B. Johnson, N. Morga, Nicholas P. Jewell. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2007

660 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Organophosphate (OP) pesticides are widely used in agriculture and homes. Animal studies suggest that even moderate doses are neurodevelopmental toxicants, but there are few studies in humans. Objectives We investigated the relationship of prenatal and child OP urinary metabolite levels with children’s neurodevelopment. Methods Participating children were from a longitudinal birth cohort of primarily Latino farm-worker families in California. We measured six nonspecific dialkylphosphate (DAP) metabolites in maternal and child urine as well as metabolites specific to malathion (MDA) and chlorpyrifos (TCPy) in maternal urine. We examined their association with children’s performance at 6 (n = 396), 12 (n = 395), and 24 (n = 372) months of age on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development [Mental Development (MDI) and Psychomotor Development (PDI) Indices] and mother’s report on the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) (n = 356). Results Generally, pregnancy DAP levels were negatively associated with MDI, but child measures were positively associated. At 24 months of age, these associations reached statistical significance [per 10-fold increase in prenatal DAPs: β = −3.5 points; 95% confidence interval (CI), −6.6 to −0.5; child DAPs: β = 2.4 points; 95% CI, 0.5 to 4.2]. Neither prenatal nor child DAPs were associated with PDI or CBCL attention problems, but both prenatal and postnatal DAPs were associated with risk of pervasive developmental disorder [per 10-fold increase in prenatal DAPs: odds ratio (OR) = 2.3, p = 0.05; child DAPs OR = 1.7, p = 0.04]. MDA and TCPy were not associated with any outcome. Conclusions We report adverse associations of prenatal DAPs with mental development and pervasive developmental problems at 24 months of age. Results should be interpreted with caution given the observed positive relationship with postnatal DAPs.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Plant Science, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c28a425f18b1648d93893909d8bf8df8f94c78ce

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Citations in the corpus

Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap (2015, methodology): “We forced the null hypothesis to be true by randomly re-assigning the 30 ’organic’ and ’conventional’ labels for each study and then using the R package Metafor 31 [7] to implement a random effects meta-analysis on each randomized dataset.”
The Changing Epidemiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders (2016, background): “Two studies have reported significant increases in risk of ASD traits with prenatal pesticide exposure; one found an association between maternal concentrations of a marker of organophosphate (OP) pesticide exposure and pervasive developmental disorder traits (59); the other reported an association ”
Practitioner Review: What have we learnt about the causes of ADHD? (2013, background): “Others find that prenatalmaternalandpostnatalchildurinarymetabolites of a range of pesticides have no link with ADHD-like symptoms at age 2 years (Eskenazi et al., 2007), but subsequent followupat3.”