Associations of prenatal maternal urinary concentrations of triclosan and benzophenone-3 with cognition in 7.5-month-old infants.

Background: Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have been linked to adverse health outcomes and prenatal exposure is known to impact infant and child development. However, few studies have assessed early developmental consequences of prenatal exposure to two common phenolic compounds, benzophenone-3 (BP-3) and triclosan (TCS).
Objective: We evaluated the relationship of prenatal exposure to BP-3 and TCS with infant cognition at 7.5 months via performance on a visual recognition memory (VRM) task.
Methods: Drawing from the Illinois Kids Development Study (IKIDS) cohort, prenatal exposure to BP-3 and TCS was assessed in pools of five urine samples collected from each woman across pregnancy. Cognition was measured in 310 infants using a VRM task assessing information processing speed, attention, and recognition memory through infrared eye-tracking. Generalized linear regression estimated exposure-outcome associations, followed by stratification to investigate modification of associations by infant sex and stimulus set.
Results: Sampled mothers were more likely to be white, college educated, and middle or high income relative to the US population. Mean chemical exposures were significantly higher than those of adult women in the NHANES cohort. In models adjusted for income, gestational age at birth, and testing age, prenatal BP-3 exposure was associated with an increase in run duration (average time spent looking at the stimuli before looking away) (β = 0.0011, CI -0.0001:0.0022), indicating slower information processing speed, while TCS was associated with significantly longer time to familiarization (time to accrue a total of 20 s of looking time to the stimuli) (β = 0.0686, CI 0.0203:0.1168, p < 0.01), indicating poorer attention. Stratum-specific analyses isolated both effects to male infants who viewed the second of two stimulus sets.
Conclusion: Higher prenatal exposure to triclosan was associated with poorer attention in infancy, while benzophenone-3 may be associated with slower information processing speed, particularly among males.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Nicholas Cragoe reports financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health. Jenna Sprowles reports financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health. Megan L. Woodbury reports financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health. Salma Musaad reports financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health. Elizabeth Enright reports financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health. Andrea Aguiar reports financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health. Susan L. Schantz reports financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Published by Elsevier Inc.)