Mother's Exposure to Bisphenol A May Raise Children's Asthma Risk

Filed in archive Medical Issues on February 13, 2010

© Klearchos Kapoutsis

I'm cross-posting this entry here from Allergizer because i think this is also of concern especially for mothers-to-be:

Over the last few years, there have been many studies linking bisphenol A (BPA) exposure to reproductive disorders, obesity, abnormal brain development as well as breast and prostate cancers. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it was concerned about "the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and young children." Now, researchers have shown in mouse experiments that a mother's exposure to BPA may also increase the probability that her children will develop asthma.

The UTMB researchers said that although more work is needed to determine the precise mechanism of that response, it almost certainly has its roots in the property of BPA thought to contribute to other health problems: its status as an "environmental estrogen." Environmental estrogens are natural or artificial chemicals from outside the body that when consumed mimic the hormone estrogen, activating its powerful biochemical signaling networks in often dangerous ways. In a 2007 Environmental Health Perspectives paper, for example, Midoro-Horiuti, Goldblum and UTMB professor and current study co-author Cheryl Watson described how adding small amounts of environmental estrogens into cultures of human and mouse mast cells - common immune cells packed with allergic response-inducing chemicals such as histamine - produced a sudden release of allergy-promoting substances.

Considering how plastics, and thus BPA, is so prevalent nowadays, this is certainly alarming. If this is true, it is not enough that we minimize our children's exposure to the chemical to protect them. I hope they conduct epidemiological studies in humans soon to establish just how applicable these data are to us.
For a related video report, click here.