Plastic bisphenol A linked to female aggression
USA Today reports on a new study that adds to the growing concern that prenatal exposure to the chemical bisphenol A could harm children’s development. In the study of 249 pregnant women, the first to examine the effects of BPA on children’s behavior, researchers found that girls whose mothers had the highest levels of BPA during pregnancy were more aggressive and hyperactive at age 2 than other girls. Findings appear today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
Girls were more likely to be aggressive if their mothers had high levels of BPA — an estrogen-like chemical used in many consumer products — early in pregnancy or at about 16 weeks, the study says. A typical pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. The girls had aggression scores that were similar to those of boys, as measured by a commonly used test, says co-author Joe Braun of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Boys appeared unaffected by BPA.
Braun says he plans to follow children until age 5, because behaviors can change over time. Based largely on animal experiments, the government’s National Toxicology Program last year expressed “some concern” about BPA’s effects on the brain, behavior and prostate gland in children before and after birth. Hugh Taylor, an obstetrician/gynecologist at Yale University School of Medicine, notes that the new findings closely match the animal studies.
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