Science: Exposure to chemical cocktails during pregnancy alters brain development

There is growing evidence that the environmental chemicals to which we are constantly exposed may have endocrine-disrupting properties and therefore may pose a danger to human and animal health and development

"What is unique about this integrated project is that we link population data with experimental studies and then use this information to develop new methods for assessing the risk of chemical mixtures

The study was conducted in three steps:

First, in the Swedish pregnancy cohort SELMA, a cocktail of chemicals found in the blood and urine of pregnant women was associated with delayed language development in 30-month-old children

Second, experimental studies have revealed molecular targets through which levels of this mixture, associated with humans, perturb endocrine circuits and the regulation of genes associated with autism and intellectual disability

Third, the results of the experimental study were used to develop new principles for risk assessment of such mixtures

Joëlle Rüegg, Professor of Environmental Toxicology at Uppsala University and Deputy Coordinator of EDC-MixRisk, said: "It is striking that the findings in the experimental system mirror very well what we found in the epidemiology section, in normal human exposure.

Human brain organoids (advanced in vitro cultures that recapitulate significant aspects of human brain development) offer the first opportunity to directly probe the molecular effects of this mixture on human brain tissue at a stage that matches that measured during pregnancy

"One of the key hormonal pathways affected is thyroid hormone

By linking different scientific methods, the researchers were able to show that 54 percent of the children included in the Selma study were at risk for language delay (30 months of age) and their prenatal exposure to a mixture of chemicals at levels above levels would affect neural development

Journal Reference :

1. Nicolò Caporale, Michelle Leemans, Lina Birgersson, Pierre-Luc Germain, Cristina Cheroni, Gábor Borbély, Elin Engdahl, Christian Lindh, Raul Bardini Bressan, Francesca Cavallo, Nadav Even Chorev, Giuseppe Alessandro D’Agostino, Steven M .