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. 2011 Oct;119(10):1436-41.
doi: 10.1289/ehp.1003184. Epub 2011 Jun 29.

Prenatal lead exposure and weight of 0- to 5-year-old children in Mexico city

Myriam Afeiche  1 , Karen E Peterson, Brisa N Sánchez, David Cantonwine, Héctor Lamadrid-Figueroa, Lourdes Schnaas, Adrienne S Ettinger, Mauricio Hernández-Avila, Howard Hu, Martha M Téllez-Rojo
Affiliations

Prenatal lead exposure and weight of 0- to 5-year-old children in Mexico city

Myriam Afeiche et al. Environ Health Perspect. 2011 Oct.

Abstract

Background: Cumulative prenatal lead exposure, as measured by maternal bone lead burden, has been associated with smaller weight of offspring at birth and 1 month of age, but no study has examined whether this effect persists into early childhood.

Objective: We investigated the association of perinatal maternal bone lead, a biomarker of cumulative prenatal lead exposure, with children's attained weight over time from birth to 5 years of age.

Methods: Children were weighed at birth and at several intervals up until 60 months. Maternal tibia and patella lead were measured at 1 month postpartum using in vivo K-shell X-ray fluorescence. We used varying coefficient models with random effects to assess the association of maternal bone lead with weight trajectories of 522 boys and 477 girls born between 1994 and 2005 in Mexico City.

Results: After controlling for breast-feeding duration, maternal anthropometry, and sociodemographic characteristics, a 1-SD increase in maternal patella lead (micrograms per gram) was associated with a 130.9-g decrease in weight [95% confidence interval (CI), -227.4 to -34.4 g] among females and a 13.0-g nonsignificant increase in weight among males (95% CI, -73.7 to 99.9 g) at 5 years of age. These associations were similar after controlling for concurrent blood lead levels between birth and 5 years.

Conclusions: Maternal bone lead was associated with lower weight over time among female but not male children up to 5 years of age. Given that the association was evident for patellar but not tibial lead levels, and was limited to females, results need to be confirmed in other studies.

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Conflict of interest statement

The contents of this article are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIEHS, National Institutes of Health, or the U.S. EPA.

The authors declare they have no actual or potential competing financial interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Adjusted predicted weight trajectories for females (A) and males (B) whose mothers had 2 SDs of patella lead above (solid black curves) and below the mean (dashed red curves), obtained using varying coefficient models with random effects to quantify the multivariable association of lead with weight over time. Smooth functions of child’s age in months were used. The weight trajectories are adjusted for cohort; maternal age at delivery, calf circumference, height, education, number of pregnancies, breast-feeding for 6 months, and calcium treatment group assignment; and child’s gestational age at birth and height. p-Value for testing the difference of effect across age among females = 0.08.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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