Bisphenol A and the primate ovary

Abstract

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical used in the production of epoxy resins and polycarbonate plastics found in many household items (1). Human exposure is so ubiquitous that 0.2–20 ng/mL of BPA (2) is circulating in the body at any given time. Research has shown evidence that exposure to BPA is associated with problems such as anxiety (3), short-term memory loss (4), obesity (5), diabetes (6), and cardiovascular disease (7). However, critics of these studies have pointed out, among other things, that many of these studies were done in nonprimate laboratory animals whose physiology may differ from humans (8). In PNAS, Hunt et al. (9) provide evidence in the rhesus macaque monkey (Macaca mulatta) that prolonged maternal exposure to BPA has a direct influence on the process of meiosis in the fetal ovaries of a primate, the consequences of which are not seen for a generation. It is thus fair to say that BPA may be viewed as the only known aneugen, a chemical whose ingestion can produce oocytes, and thus embryos, with the wrong number of chromosomes (a condition known as aneuploidy) by disrupting the meiotic process. As aptly noted in 2003 by Hunt et al.: “BPA, a man-made substance with estrogenic properties, induces both a dramatic increase in congression failure and meiotic aneuploidy” (10).