Environmental Exposures and Child Health: What we Might Learn in the 21st Century from the National Children's Study?

Abstract

In utero and early life environmental exposure programming may be critical to the onset of many diseases and dysfunctions in adulthood (Barker, 2007; Heindel, 2006), such as an increased risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease (Palinski et al. 2007), diabetes (Armitage et al. 2008), and breast cancer (Xue and Michels, 2007). Some in utero and early life environmental exposures have demonstrated unequivocal harmful effects to children, such as thalidomide (Speirs, 1962), ionizing radiation (Doll and Wakeford, 1997), methylmercury (Watanabe and Satoh, 1996), lead (Gardella, 2001), environmental tobacco smoke (Herrmann et al. 2008), cigarette smoking and high alcohol consumption during pregnancy (Krulewitch, 2005; Shea and Steiner, 2008). Whereas other in utero and early life environmental exposures have come under scrutiny without consensus as to the degree of influence on child or adult health, such as exposure to pesticides (Eskenazi et al. 1999), polybrominated biphenyls (PCBs) (Guo et al. 1995), nitrates (Mueller et al. 2004), bisphenol A (vom Saal and Hughes, 2005), and phytoestrogens (Damgaard et al. 2002).