Prenatal exposure to multiple organochlorine compounds and childhood body mass index

Elena Colicino; Katerina Margetaki; Damaskini Valvi; Nicolo Foppa Pedretti; Nikos Stratakis; Marina Vafeiadi; Theano Roumeliotaki; Soterios A Kyrtopoulos; Hannu Kiviranta; Euripides G Stephanou; Manolis Kogevinas; Rob McConnell; Kiros T Berhane; Leda Chatzi; David V Conti

doi:10.1097/EE9.0000000000000201

Prenatal exposure to multiple organochlorine compounds and childhood body mass index

Environ Epidemiol. 2022 Apr 22;6(3):e201. doi: 10.1097/EE9.0000000000000201. eCollection 2022 Jun.

Authors

Elena Colicino¹, Katerina Margetaki^{2

3}, Damaskini Valvi¹, Nicolo Foppa Pedretti¹, Nikos Stratakis⁴, Marina Vafeiadi³, Theano Roumeliotaki³, Soterios A Kyrtopoulos⁵, Hannu Kiviranta⁶, Euripides G Stephanou⁷, Manolis Kogevinas^{4

8

9}, Rob McConnell², Kiros T Berhane¹⁰, Leda Chatzi², David V Conti¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York.
² Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.
³ Department of Social Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece.
⁴ ISGlobal, Barcelona, Spain.
⁵ Institute of Chemical Biology, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, Greece.
⁶ Department of Health Security, National Institute for Health and Welfare, Kuopio, Finland.
⁷ Environmental Chemical Processes Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece.
⁸ Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
⁹ CIBER Epidemiología y Salud Pública, Barcelona, Spain.
¹⁰ Department of Biostatistics, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York.

Abstract

Background: Prenatal exposure to organochlorine compounds (OCs) has been associated with increased childhood body mass index (BMI); however, only a few studies have focused on longitudinal BMI trajectories, and none of them used multiple exposure mixture approaches.

Aim: To determine the association between in-utero exposure to eight OCs and childhood BMI measures (BMI and BMI z-score) at 4 years and their yearly change across 4-12 years of age in 279 Rhea child-mother dyads.

Methods: We applied three approaches: (1) linear mixed-effect regressions (LMR) to associate individual compounds with BMI measures; (2) Bayesian weighted quantile sum regressions (BWQSR) to provide an overall OC mixture association with BMI measures; and (3)Bayesian varying coefficient kernel machine regressions (BVCKMR) to model nonlinear and nonadditive associations.

Results: In the LMR, yearly change of BMI measures was consistently associated with a quartile increase in hexachlorobenzene (HCB) (estimate [95% Confidence or Credible interval] BMI: 0.10 [0.06, 0.14]; BMI z-score: 0.02 [0.01, 0.04]). BWQSR results showed that a quartile increase in mixture concentrations was associated with yearly increase of BMI measures (BMI: 0.10 [0.01, 0.18]; BMI z-score: 0.03 [0.003, 0.06]). In the BVCKMR, a quartile increase in dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene concentrations was associated with higher BMI measures at 4 years (BMI: 0.33 [0.24, 0.43]; BMI z-score: 0.19 [0.15, 0.24]); whereas a quartile increase in HCB and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB)-118 levels was positively associated with BMI measures yearly change (BMI: HCB:0.10 [0.07, 0.13], PCB-118:0.08 [0.04, 012]; BMI z-score: HCB:0.03 [0.02, 0.05], PCB-118:0.02 [0.002,04]). BVCKMR suggested that PCBs had nonlinear relationships with BMI measures, and HCB interacted with other compounds.

Conclusions: All analyses consistently demonstrated detrimental associations between prenatal OC exposures and childhood BMI measures.

Keywords: Bayesian varying coefficient kernel machine regressions; Bayesian weighted quantile sum regressions; Body mass index; Chemical mixture; Organochlorine compounds; Outcome trajectories.