Americans are being exposed to significantly lower levels
of some phthalates that were banned from children’s articles in 2008,
but exposures to other forms of these chemicals are rising steeply,
according to a study led by researchers at UC San Francisco.
Phthalate exposures to adult men have been linked to DNA
damage in sperm and lower sperm quality, while exposures to pregnant
women have been linked to alterations in the genital development of
their male children, as well as cognitive and behavioral problems in
boys and girls.
The paper, published in Environmental Health Perspectives,
is the first to examine how phthalate exposures have changed over time
in a large, representative sample of the U.S. population. It delineates
trends in a decade’s worth of data—from 2001 to 2010—in exposure to
eight phthalates among 11,000 people who took part in the National
Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We were excited to see that exposure to some of the
phthalates that are of public health concern actually went down,” said
Ami Zota, ScD, MS, an assistant professor of environmental and
occupational health at the George Washington University School of Public
Health and Health Services, who did the research when she was a
postdoctoral fellow at UCSF’s Program on Reproductive Health and the
Environment. “Unfortunately, our data also suggest that these are being
replaced by other phthalates with potential adverse health effects.”
