Discipline: Ecology Environmental and Earth Sciences
Subcategory: Pollution/Toxic Substances/Waste
Session: 3
Room: Exhibit Hall
Deytzalie J. Rodríguez Hernández - University of Puerto Rico in Aguadilla Campus
Co-Author(s): Nancy R Cardona Cordero1, Luis Agosto Arroyo2 Gredia Huertas Montanez2, Deborah Watkins3, Zaira Rosario Pabón5, Ishwara Ayala Ortiz5, John D Meeker3, Carmen Velez Vega2, Jose Cordero4, Akram Alshawabkeh51.University of Puerto Rico in Aguadilla Campus2.University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus3.University of Michigan4.University of Georgia5.Northeastern University
Understanding how pregnancy exposures can affect children’s neurodevelopment at an early stage is a public health priority. Studies have shown that Parabens can act as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), giving it the potential to affect thyroid hormones, gestational age, oxidative stress, and inflammation during pregnancy1. Our goal was to assess the relationship between levels of parabens during mother’s pregnancy and children’s neurodevelopment at age 2 in the Puerto Rico Testsite for Exploring Contamination Threats Cohort (PROTECT). Our hypothesis is that children of participants with higher levels of parabens will have a higher probability of neurodevelopment delay. In our sample (n = 129), we included PROTECT participants who provided urine samples during the first, second, or third trimester of pregnancy and detected levels of ethyl/methyl/propyl/butylparaben were observed and whose children were evaluated at age 2. BDI-2 results from the communication domain were cross-tabulated using chi-square and fisher’s exact test with sociodemographic measures to acknowledge the observations and the p-value using STATA. In addition, a calculation of descriptive statistics, observations, mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, median, and IQR for each paraben per visit was summarized to observe how the concentrations of these metabolites are distributed. Our subset of participants was young (mean age= 28), and 88% had attained a high school diploma. Children were predominantly female (55%), and only one child was diagnosed with language impairment. Higher levels of methylparaben were consistently observed throughout the pregnancy when compared to the other parabens. Our preliminary results do not show a relationship between any of the participants’ parabens levels at each trimester of pregnancy and children’s neurodevelopment delay at age 2. Future studies can consider creating new categories for parabens and the use of additional statistics to fully understand the whole picture during the participants’ pregnancy. Nonetheless, this is the first study that evaluates the relationship between paraben exposure and neurodevelopment in children among Hispanic Puerto Ricans.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): PRLSAMP
Faculty Advisor: Nancy R Cardona Cordero, nancy.cardona@upr.edu
Role: My position included proposing the environmental factor, literature review, and statistical analysis.