Effects of environmental exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls and dioxins on cognitive abilities in Dutch children at 42 months of age☆,☆☆,★
Section snippets
Subjects
From June 1990 until June 1992, healthy pregnant women living in Rotterdam and Groningen were asked by their obstetrician or midwife to participate in a prospective, longitudinal, neurodevelopmental study. The Rotterdam area is a highly industrialized and densely populated region situated in the west, and the Groningen area is a semiurban region in the north of the Netherlands. To study the effects of prenatal and postnatal PCB and dioxin exposure, women who intended to breast-feed their child
RESULTS
From the original cohort of 418 children, 209 were BF and 209 were FF during infancy; 207 subjects were from the Rotterdam area, and 211 were from the Groningen area. At 42 months of age 395 (94%) subjects were re-examined for their neurodevelopmental follow-up; 6% (n = 23) were lost to follow-up because of a lack of interest (n = 19) and emigration (n = 4). Another 15 children failed to cooperate with the testing procedure, refusing to respond to some of the 11 subtests, and were excluded from
DISCUSSION
We report that prenatal exposure to “background” PCB concentrations is associated with poorer performance on cognitive tests in Dutch children at 42 months of age. No associations between lactational exposure to PCBs and dioxins nor current PCB body burden and cognitive abilities at 42 months of age are found, suggesting that the developing fetal brain is particularly sensitive to these compounds. Our results are in agreement with the reported cognitive deficits in the Yu-Cheng “poisoning” study
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr C. Koopman-Esseboom and Dr M. Huisman for the recruitment of all mother-infant pairs. We thank Prof J. L. Jacobson and Prof G. Winneke for their critical review of this article, and all the families who have participated in this follow-up study.
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Funded by the European Commission within the Environmental and Health Programmes (Contract-No EV5V-CT92-0207).
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Reprint requests: Svati Patandin, MD, Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatology, SP 3435, Sophia Children’s Hospital, PO Box 2060, 3000 CB Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
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0022-3476/99/$8.00 + 0 9/21/94848