7 Nasty Effects of BPA

BPA – The Plastic Chemical

by Mike Barrett
March 26th, 2013


Bisphenol A (BPA) is the widely used chemical found in many plastics, food can linings, and even on US dollars and receipts. Known as an endocrine-disrupting chemical that mimics the hormone estrogen, BPA has been linked to numerous negative health effects in countless studies. The worst part? While the Food and Drug Administration considered banning the chemical in March of 2012, the ban was denied, and BPA continues to be ubiquitous. So what exactly does mean? It means the entire U.S. is still subjected to the chemical’s negative effects.
Here are 7 nasty effects of BPA.

1. Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is slowly becoming one of the many well-known negative outcomes induced by BPA exposure. In fact, over 130 studies have confirmed the link between bisphenol A and to ailments like breast cancer, obesity, and reproductive problems. Ironically, the popular nonprofit Susan G. Komen for the Cure partners with many bottled water companies for their ‘For the Cure’ races across the nation. The problem, obviously, is that most of these plastic bottles contain BPA.

2. Early Puberty

While girls typically enter into puberty (or have in the past, at least) at just over ten years of age, studies show that this age has fallen by more than a year within only one generation. Some girls are even seeing breasts at 7 years old. Although there are other factors to consider, BPA may be to blame as well.

After examining 1,151 girls between the ages of 6 and 8 in the United States over a two year period, researchers found that multiple chemical classes were detected at high levels within the girls’ urine. About one-third of the girls went through puberty prematurely.

“Our research shows a connection between chemicals that girls are exposed to on a daily basis and either delayed or early development. While more research is needed, these data are an important first step in evaluating the impact of these common environmental agents in putting girls at risk,” lead researchers Dr Mary Wolff said.

3. Heart Disease

Some research has linked both BPA and phthalates to a disorder known as atherosclerosis. This disorder, which is the hardening of the arteries through the buildup of plaques, negatively impacts blood flow and ultimately increases your risk of heart disease. Shocking, the research is not the first of its kind. One team also found that individuals with higher levels of bisphenol-a in their urine were more than twice as likely to suffer from coronary heart disease than those with lower levels.

4. and 5. Infertility in Males and Females

Bisphenol a has been found to be adversely affecting male genital development, subsequently leading to compromised fertility health. One study examined the effects of BPA on the distance between the genitalia and the anus in males, known as the Anogenital distance (AGD). AGD is very important biologically for a number of reasons, and plays a prominent role in the health of one’s fertility. Researchers found that parental exposure to BPA during pregnancy was associated with shortened AGD in male offspring. In other words, high level BPA exposure led to offspring with AGD defects.

AGD has been linked to fertility in males, making BPA’s negative impact on the male reproductive system noteworthy. Men with an AGD lower than the median, which sits around 52 mm (2 in), have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as compared to those with a longer AGD.

But males aren’t the only one’s suffering; BPA has been linked to reproductive issues in women as well. In one study, researchers found that BPA caused reproductive problems that can affect women, including abnormal egg development. The eggs of fetuses exposed to BPA had difficulty forming follicles, which ultimately increases the risk of eggs dying before maturation. Additionally, the researchers observed other abnormalities, showing signs that they would carry too many chromosomes as a result of not dividing during development. This could lead to miscarriages or disorders like Down Syndrome.

6. Sparks Multiple Negative Brain Alterations

Further adding on to BPAs long list of negative effects, some research has also found that the chemical disrupts a gene responsible for proper nerve cell function, ultimately leading to compromised brain development. Researchers of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discovered that BPA could damage central nervous system development by disrupting a gene called Kcc2.


“Our study found that BPA may impair the development of the central nervous system, and raises the question as to whether exposure could predispose animals and humans to neurodevelopmental disorders,” study researcher Dr. Wolfgang Liedtke, M.D., Ph.D., said.

Another study found that exposure to bisphenol-A early in life can spark changes in gene expression. The changes occur in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which can lead to increased levels of anxiety.

The study abstract states:


“Early life exposure to Bisphenol A (BPA), a component of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins, alters sociosexual behavior in numerous species including humans. The present study focused on the ontogeny of these behavioral effects beginning in adolescence and assessed the underlying molecular changes in the amygdala.”

7. Obesity

Last, but certainly not least, BPA may be one of many factors responsible for the obesity epidemic. One study found that high BPA exposure is associated with obesity in the general adult population in the U.S.

Another study, examining BPA concentrations in the urine of kids aged 6 to 19, found that obese children made up 22% of individuals with the highest BPA levels in their urine. About 10% of kids who had the lowest BPA concentration in their urine were obese.

Toxic Time Bombs

Chemicals Can Alter Development for Generations

by STEVEN HIGGS

 

The pernicious impact of toxic chemicals in the body, from suspected roles in autism to human response to everyday stress, can manifest themselves in future generations, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Texas (UT) and Washington State University (WSU).

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the animal study found DNA changes wrought by a common fungicide are passed down from parents to offspring, according to a May 22, 2012, UT news release. The researchers studied how the animals respond to stress.

“The ancestral exposure of your great-grandmother alters your brain development to then respond to stress differently,” said WSU professor Michael Skinner.

Along with UT’s David Crews, Skinner and colleagues exposed gestating female rats to the popular fruit and vegetable fungicide vinclozolin and monitored for “epigenetic changes,” which can be passed on to subsequent generations.

Crews and Skinner subjected the exposed rats’ third generation of offspring to a variety of behavioral tests and found them to be more anxious and sensitive to stress. They also had greater activity in stress-related regions of the brain than descendants of unexposed rats.

“We are now in the third human generation since the start of the chemical revolution, since humans have been exposed to these kinds of chemicals,” Crews said in the release. “This is the animal model of that.”

Crews, whose contributions to the paper focused on the neuroscience, behavior and stress aspects, said increases in disorders like autism and bipolar disorder may be connected to the kind of “two-hit” exposure that the experiment is modeling.

“It’s more than just a change in diagnostics,” he said of the documented increases in mental disorders in recent decades. “The question is: Why? Is it because we are living in a more frantic world, or because we are living in a more frantic world and are responding to that in a different way because we, or our ancestors, have been exposed to environmental contaminants. I favor the latter.”

***

The stress study is the second that Crews and UT colleague Andrea Gore have authored on vinclozolin in five years. In 2007 they found exposure to the toxin can affect mate choice in later generations.


Also published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, the study found that female rats avoid males whose great-grandmothers were exposed to the fungicide and preferred males whose ancestors were uncontaminated, according to a March 27, 2007, UT news release.

“Even across generations, your attractiveness as a mate is decreased if your great-grandmother has been exposed to environmental chemicals,” said Gore. “That will have an impact on your ability to reproduce and could take you out of the gene pool.”

Vinclozolin is also linked early onset of cancer and kidney disease in males, they said.
Crews and Gore studied the early onset of disease in rats caused by initial exposure to vinclozolin and found it was passed down generation to generation through the males.

“The female is able to detect which male is likely to get early onset disease and which male is not before they show any manifestation of disease,” Crews said.

Gore added, “The female rats can sense something is wrong, although they can’t see it.”
Males exhibited no preference for female type and generally move on to other populations to mate, the release said. So the effect of vinclozolin exposure in the natural setting would not only span generations but could also reach other populations of animals through male migrations.

“Males disperse, and if they were to mate, it would be at times that they aren’t manifesting signs of disease,” said Crews. “They are literally time bombs.”

***

Crews and Gore write blogs on the Huffington Post and on March 19, 2012, penned a joint column titled “Our Contaminated World” that focused on the Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) pending decision to allow the toxic chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) in food packaging like coated metal cans and plastic wraps.

“There is a long scientific history showing a link between exposure to endocrine disruptors and reproductive disorders such as infertility and early puberty.” - Professors David Crews and Lauren Gore, University of Texas

“Epidemiological evidence in humans shows associations between BPA and cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders and reproductive impairments,” they wrote. “Beyond BPA, endocrine disruptors are linked to cancer, obesity, reproductive disorders and mood disorders like anxiety and depression.”

Endocrine disruptors, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), are chemicals that interfere with the endocrine or hormone system and can produce “adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects in both humans and wildlife.”

In response to a complaint from the Natural Resources Defense Council, the FDA decided to continue allowing BPA in food packaging, Huffington Post blogger Lynne Peeples reported on March 20, 2012.

Chemicals like vinclozolin and BPA are undeniably useful, protecting grapes from fungus, leafy greens from pests and children from fire ants and flammable pajamas, Crews and Gore wrote the day before the FDA decision on BPA.

“They’re also in us, and transforming our bodies and minds,” they said. “There is a long scientific history showing a link between exposure to endocrine disruptors and reproductive disorders such as infertility and early puberty. Furthermore, the evidence is growing that the damage is much more widespread.”

Chemicals have been shown to increase the risk of various cancers, to contribute to obesity and to influence the activity of neurotransmitters in the brain, they continued.

“In fact, there are even hints that exposure to the chemicals may have something to do with the dramatic rise in autism and mental disorders over the past few decades,” they said.

With geneticists beginning to appreciate the fundamental role of the environment in shaping who humans are, the question is no longer simply “nature or nurture?”

“We know that nature (the environment) has been changed by contamination, and this leads to changes in how organisms are nurtured,” Crews and Gore wrote.

Is Environmental Injustice Morphing Little Girls’ Bodies?

by Michelle Chen | Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by Colorlines

The beginning of adolescence is a tough time for any girl. It's harder when you're growing up in a tough neighborhood and go to a rough school. And it's really hard when you face all the surging hormones and other tribulations of puberty before you even reach your eighth birthday.

If this sounds unnatural, it's the reality for many young girls of color who experience early signs of puberty at alarming rates. The latest research adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that an array of social and environmental factors may be causing girls' bodies to develop prematurely. The New York Times reports that the potential causes flagged by researchers include exposures to chemical contaminants (namely bisphenol A) and obesity. The study-supported by the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Centers-looked at 1,239 girls screened in Manhattan, Cincinnati and San Francisco. It reveals stark racial disparities.

The girls who developed breasts early, as young as age seven, were disproportionately Black and Latina. Black 8-year-olds were more than twice as likely as white girls to develop breasts. As the NYT reports:

At 7 years, 10.4 percent of white, 23.4 percent of black and 14.9 percent of Hispanic girls had enough breast development to be considered at the onset of puberty.

At age 8, the figures were 18.3 percent in whites, 42.9 percent in blacks and 30.9 percent in Hispanics. The percentages for blacks and whites were even higher than those found by a 1997 study that was one of the first to suggest that puberty was occurring earlier in girls.

As Susan Shane explained in a 2008 Colorlines essay, early puberty tends to produce complicated dilemmas. Girls often find themselves physically maturing at a faster pace than they learn how to deal with sexual contact, and may face certain cancer risks later in life.

The findings dovetail with earlier research by the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, which has tracked elevated exposures to environmental toxins in mothers in low-income New York neighborhoods. The data reflect a disturbing prevalence of chemicals known to be endocrine disruptors, including common plastic ingredients known as pthalates.

The Obama administration has begun taking environmental health risks more seriously, beginning with a groundbreaking report from the Presidential Cancer Panel which highlighted the threats of environmental carcinogens.

Meanwhile, the White House is campaigning to reduce childhood obesity, another health problem tied to early-onset puberty, which may expand poor kids' access to healthy foods and recreation.

As the budget battle shakes out, it's too early to tell how comprehensively the administration will address the link between health and environment. The research is clear, however: the risk to youth isn't just about "lifestyle," but justice, especially for the young girls of color who carry an unequal burden as they step suddenly into adulthood.

First Signs of Puberty Seen in Younger Girls

By DENISE GRADY
Published: August 9, 2010

A new study finds that girls are more likely today than in the past to start developing breasts by age 7 or 8.

The research is just the latest in a flood of reports over the last decade that have led to concern and heated debate about whether girls are reaching puberty earlier, and why it might be happening.

Increased rates of obesity are thought to play a major role, because body fat can produce sex hormones. Some researchers also suspect that environmental chemicals that mimic the effects of estrogen may be speeding up the clock on puberty, but that idea is unproved.

The issue is of concern for both medical and psychosocial reasons. Studies suggest that earlier puberty, as measured by the age at first menstruation, can slightly increase the risk of breast cancer, probably because it results in longer lifetime exposure to the hormones estrogen and progesterone, which can feed some tumors.

Although the new study did not look at menstrual age, breast growth is also a sign of hormone exposure, and some researchers fear that early development might also mean an increased cancer risk.

Socially and emotionally, life can be difficult for a girl who has a child’s mind in a woman’s body and is not ready to deal with sexual advances from men and boys, or cope with her own hormone-spiked emotions and sexual impulses.

“Our analysis shows clearly that the white participants entered puberty earlier than we anticipated,” said Dr. Frank M. Biro, the first author of the study and the director of adolescent medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Overweight girls were more likely to have more breast development, the study showed. But Dr. Biro said he did not think weight was the whole story. He said it was possible that environmental chemicals were also playing a role, and added that he and his colleagues were now studying the girls’ hormone levels and lab tests measuring their exposures to various chemicals.

“It’s certainly throwing up a warning flag,” Dr. Biro said. “I think we need to think about the stuff we’re exposing our bodies to and the bodies of our kids. This is a wake-up call, and I think we need to pay attention to it.”

Dr. Catherine Gordon, a pediatric endocrinologist and specialist in adolescent medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston, said that so far, most evidence showed that neither breast development nor menstrual age had changed for white girls of normal weight.

The new study included 1,239 girls ages 6 to 8 who were recruited from schools and examined at one of three sites: the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital or Kaiser Permanente Northern California/University of California, San Francisco. The group was roughly 30 percent each white, black and Hispanic, and about 5 percent Asian.

At 7 years, 10.4 percent of white, 23.4 percent of black and 14.9 percent of Hispanic girls had enough breast development to be considered at the onset of puberty.

At age 8, the figures were 18.3 percent in whites, 42.9 percent in blacks and 30.9 percent in Hispanics. The percentages for blacks and whites were even higher than those found by a 1997 study that was one of the first to suggest that puberty was occurring earlier in girls.

The new study is being published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics. It was paid for by government grants and conducted at hospitals that are part of the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Centers, a group formed in 2003 after breast cancer advocates petitioned Congress to set aside money to study possible links between environmental exposures and breast cancer.

If there is an ideal age when girls should reach puberty, no one knows what it is, said Dr. Marcia E. Herman-Giddens, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A girl needs a certain amount of body fat to start menstruating, and girls who are malnourished or ill may have delayed puberty.

In developed countries, the age of puberty dropped from the 19th to 20th centuries, as nutrition improved and infectious diseases were brought under better control, and it was seen as a sign of progress. But if the drop continues, at what point does it become pathological?

The debate over this issue started with a study published in 1997 by a research team led by Dr. Herman-Giddens. In the study, pediatricians around the country rated sexual maturation in 17,077 girls ages 3 to 12. The study found that breasts or pubic hair, or both, were far more common in 7- and 8-year-olds than medical textbooks had been reporting.

The researchers were also surprised to find that black girls developed significantly earlier than whites. But they cautioned that there had been few rigorous studies of puberty, so it was not clear whether their research was detecting a new trend or just discovering that the medical books were wrong.

The study led to a bit of a furor. Some endocrinologists doubted the findings and warned that if doctors and parents started blithely assuming that puberty at 7 or 8 was the new normal, they would overlook serious problems like endocrine diseases or tumors. But others warned that if the new findings were rejected, families would be frightened needlessly and fortunes wasted on batteries of tests for perfectly normal 7- and 8-year-old girls with budding breasts.

Dozens of studies have been published in the years since. Arguments continue, but many doctors accept the idea that heavier girls often develop earlier. And subsequent studies have also found that black and Hispanic girls mature earlier than whites, even when weight is taken into account. No one knows why. Though breasts may be sprouting earlier, the average age of first menstruation, between 12 and 13, has not really changed.

Dr. Vaneeta Bamba, director of the Diagnostic and Research Growth Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said that the 1997 study had “somewhat reshaped” endocrinologists’ thinking about the onset of puberty, but that most would still urge a thorough medical evaluation for any girl under 8 who was showing significant breast development or other signs of puberty. She said she doubted that the new study would change medical practice.

One objection to the 1997 study was that the pediatricians may have mistaken fat deposits for breast tissue in some girls, or differed in other ways in assessing the stage of breast development.

In the new study, the researchers went to great lengths to train examiners and make sure all were on the same page when it came to checking girls’ breasts and rating their stage of development.

Dr. Gordon said it would be important to continue the studies, and to try to find out whether environmental chemicals were having an effect.