‘Forever chemicals’ linked to gut inflammation in children after early exposure

‘Pfas are known to be particularly dangerous for developing children, and prenatal or early childhood exposure is linked to a range of diseases, from reproductive harms to ADHD.’ Photograph: SDI Productions/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘Pfas are known to be particularly dangerous for developing children, and prenatal or early childhood exposure is linked to a range of diseases, from reproductive harms to ADHD.’ Photograph: SDI Productions/Getty Images ‘Forever chemicals’ linked to gut inflammation in children after early exposure Researchers tracked mother-child pairs for up to 11 years, finding Pfas mixtures may affect developing guts Prenatal and early life exposure to Pfas mixtures is probably linked to higher levels of intestinal inflammation in children, new first-of-its-kind research shows . Intestinal inflammation can cause irritable bowel diseases, like ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and colorectal cancer. While Pfas has been linked to irritable bowel disease and intestinal inflammation in adults, the new peer-reviewed Mt Sinai study is the first to look at how the chemicals impact children during a critical developmental phase. The authors checked and followed mother-child pairs from during prenatal development, or just after birth, through up to 11 years of age. The findings showed a strong correlation between elevated Pfas levels around birth and markers of inflammation across the children in the cohort. “The idea that the mom-baby dyads are exposed to these very toxic chemicals this early in the children’s’ life, and that that leads to later intestinal inflammation, is a very important finding,” said Vishal Midya, a study co-author and researcher with Mt Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. “There is so much of a knowledge gap in this area, and a gap in recognizing how important the early life period is to later onset of inflammatory bowel disease.” Pfas are a class of at least 16,000 compounds often used to help products resist water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and accumulate in the environment, and they are linked to serious health problems such as cancer, kidney disease, liver problems, immune disorders and birth defects. Pfas are known to be particularly dangerous for developing children , and prenatal or early childhood exposure is linked to a range of diseases, from reproductive harms to ADHD . The new study checked for Pfas either in maternal blood collected during pregnancy, umbilical cord blood, or newborn dried blood spots across 107 mother-child pairs in the United States and Mexico. They found as many as 955 Pfas metabolites, but focused on 46 compounds that were most prevalent. These include Pfas compounds like PFOA and PFOS, which are considered the most common and dangerous, though they have been partially phased out of production. The authors also found smaller, more recently developed Pfas for which there is much less public health data, and