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Childhood obesity may be tied to BPA levels
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Urinary BPA concentration was significantly associated with obesity in a cross-sectional study of children and adolescents, according to results of a recent study.
In a sample of nearly 3,000 children and adolescents, those who had higher concentrations of urinary bisphenol A (BPA) had significantly increased odds of being obese, the study investigators reported in a recent Journal of the American Medical Association. One possible explanation for this finding is that obese children ingest food with higher BPA content or have greater adipose stores of BPA, according to Leonardo Trasande, MD, of the NYU School of Medicine, who presented the study results at a JAMA media briefing.
Trasande and colleagues analyzed the association between urinary BPA concentrations and body mass from a cross-sectional analysis of 2,838 participants aged 6 to 19 years. The patients were randomly selected for measurement of urinary BPA concentration in the 2003-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. BMI, converted to sex- and age-standardized z scores, was used to classify participants as overweight or obese. According to the findings, the median urinary BPA concentration for participants in the study was 2.8 ng/mL. The prevalence of obesity was 17.8% (n=590), and overweight was 34.1% (n=1,047).
The BPA concentrations of the participants were divided into quartiles. Controlling for race/ethnicity, age, caregiver education, poverty to income ratio, sex, serum cotinine level, caloric intake, television watching and urinary creatinine level, children in the lowest urinary BPA quartile had a lower estimated prevalence of obesity (10.3%) than those in quartiles 2 (20.1%), 3 (19%) and 4 (22.3%). Compared with the first quartile, participants in the third quartile had approximately twice the odds for obesity. Participants in the fourth quartile had a 2.6 higher odds of obesity.
Further analyses showed this association to be statistically significant among only white children and adolescents. The researchers also found that obesity was not associated with exposure to other environmental phenols commonly used in other consumer products, including sunscreens and soaps.
“To our knowledge, this is the first report of an association of an environmental chemical exposure with childhood obesity in a nationally representative sample,” the researchers said in a JAMA press.
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