A Correlation Between Month of Conception and Birth Defects, But Why?
According to a new study published in the recent Acta Pædiatrica journal, American women might be wise to skip the baby making during spring and summer months. The study, which analyzed the 30.1 million births in the United States between 1996 and 2002, found that there was an increased number of babies with birth defects born to those women who conceived in April, May, June, and July.
But what’s behind all this? Turns out this is the time of the year when there is also an increase in the levels of pesticides in the surface water across the United States. These pesticides include atrazine (which is banned in Europe but still used in the United States) and nitrates, chemicals already suspected to be harmful to the developing embryo.
But this is the first time that a study has been able to link the increased seasonal concentration of pesticides in surface water to a similar increase in birth defects in newborns conceived in the same months.
This is an important finding, for as Dr Winchester, lead author, says “”¦ if our suspicions are right and pesticides are contributing to birth defect risk, we can reverse or modify the factors that are causing these lifelong and often very serious medical problems.”
Image: mikebaird
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1 Comment
April 6th, 2009 at 11:20 am
As far as I know we’ve known for a long time that there is a month by month variation in birth defects. If memory serves me correctly too, this holds (for the same months) in the southern hemisphere, which, as the seasons are opposite down there, would rather confuse the pesticide issue.
I think the authors of this paper are pushing an agenda- or at least whoever wrote the press release* that the article you linked to is based on is- as the leaning on a pesticides link seems uncharacteristic of science journal publishing. Quite apart from anything else, so many things in the body are temperature related yet they seem to make little mention of the fact that these women would have their first trimester in the hottest months of the year, which would seem to me another interesting angle. On the other hand, ambient temperature would be a much harder issue to fix, so perhaps we ought to ‘hope’ that there is a causative relationship at play here with the pesticides!
*I am very impressed that Science Daily indicate that the article is written from press releases. Such transparency- if only we could get that in the British press!
Remember, correlation does not even IMPLY causation: http://xkcd.com/552/
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