VITO Health, Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), Mol, Belgium.
Division of Environmental Epidemiology, Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Environ Int. 2020 Dec;145:106149. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2020.106149. Epub 2020 Sep 28.
Prenatal chemical exposure has frequently been associated with reduced fetal growth although results have been inconsistent. Most studies associate single pollutant exposure to this health outcome, even though this does not reflect real life situations as humans are exposed to many pollutants during their life time. The objective of this study is to investigate the association between prenatal exposure to a mixture of persistent environmental chemicals and birth weight using multipollutant models.
We combined exposure biomarker data measured in cord blood samples of 1579 women from four Flemish birth cohorts collected over a 10 years' time period. The common set of available and detectable exposure measures in these cohorts are three polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) congeners (138, 153 and 180), hexachlorobenzene (HCB), dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (p,p'-DDE) and the metals cadmium and lead. Multiple linear regression (MLR), Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), penalized regression using minimax concave penalty (MCP) and Bayesian Adaptive Sampling (BAS) were applied to assess the influence of multiple pollutants in a single analysis on birth weight, adjusted for a priori selected covariates.
In the pooled dataset, a median (P25-P75) birth weight and gestational age of 3420 (3140-3700) grams and 39 (39-40) weeks was observed respectively. The median contaminant levels in cord blood were: 15.8, 26.5, 18.0, 16.9 and 91.5 ng/g lipid for PCB 138, PCB 153, PCB 180, HCB and p,p'-DDE, respectively, 0.075 µg/L for cadmium and 9.7 µg/L for lead. According to the applied statistical methods for multipollutant assessment, p,p'-DDE and PCB 180 were most consistently associated with birth weight. In addition, PCB 153 was selected when applying MCP and BAS. An inverse association with birth weight was found for the PCB congeners, while an increased birth weight was observed for elevated levels of p,p'-DDE.
Assessing the health risk of combinations of exposure biomarkers reflects better real-world situations and thereby allows more effective risk assessment. Our results add to the existing evidence based on detrimental effects of PCBs on birth weight and indicate a possible increase in birth weight due to p,p'-DDE (while correcting for PCBs).
尽管结果不一致，但产前化学暴露经常与胎儿生长受限有关。大多数研究将单一污染物暴露与这种健康结果联系起来，尽管这并不能反映人类在其一生中暴露于许多污染物的真实情况。本研究的目的是使用多污染物模型研究产前暴露于混合持久性环境化学物质与出生体重之间的关系。
我们结合了在四个佛兰芒出生队列的 1579 名女性的脐带血样本中测量的暴露生物标志物数据，这些队列在 10 年内收集。这些队列中常见的可用和可检测暴露测量值是三种多氯联苯（PCB）同系物（138、153 和 180）、六氯苯（HCB）、二氯二苯二氯乙烯（p,p'-DDE）以及金属镉和铅。应用多元线性回归（MLR）、贝叶斯信息准则（BIC）、最小最大凹惩罚（MCP）惩罚回归和贝叶斯自适应采样（BAS）来评估单个分析中多种污染物对出生体重的影响，调整了预先选择的协变量。
在合并数据集，中位数（P25-P75）出生体重和胎龄分别为 3420（3140-3700）克和 39（39-40）周。脐带血中污染物的中位数水平分别为：138、153、180、HCB 和 p,p'-DDE 分别为 15.8、26.5、18.0、16.9 和 91.5ng/g 脂质，0.075µg/L 为镉，9.7µg/L 为铅。根据多污染物评估的应用统计方法，p,p'-DDE 和 PCB 180 与出生体重最一致相关。此外，在应用 MCP 和 BAS 时选择了 PCB 153。发现与出生体重呈负相关，而高水平的 p,p'-DDE 则观察到出生体重增加。
评估暴露生物标志物组合的健康风险更能反映真实情况，从而可以进行更有效的风险评估。我们的结果增加了基于 PCBs 对出生体重的有害影响的现有证据，并表明由于 p,p'-DDE（同时校正 PCBs），出生体重可能增加。
