Sicker, Fatter, Poorer by Leonardo Trasande

Author:Leonardo Trasande
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

WHAT DO ACETAMINOPHEN AND FOOD DYES HAVE IN COMMON WITH PHTHALATES? DO THEY ALSO PRODUCE MALE REPRODUCTIVE PROBLEMS AS SIDE EFFECTS?

Acetaminophen is well-known as the only pain medication obstetricians deem safe for pregnant women to take. But, like many drugs in pregnancy, while there have been studies of acetaminophen in animals, the safety of acetaminophen has not been fully assessed in pregnant women. When researchers started to recognize the effects of phthalates on the male reproductive tract, they also realized that acetaminophen and phthalates have a lot in common in their chemical structure. And, unfortunately, studies have begun to raise the alarm about acetaminophen and other analgesics commonly used in pregnancy.268

In animals, acetaminophen exposure shortens the anogenital distance in males. Human studies have identified higher rates of undescended testis in boys whose mothers took acetaminophen, particularly when exposure was in the second trimester.269,270 Not all studies of pregnant women have confirmed this phenomenon,271 but most of these studies have relied on questionnaires that ask mothers to recall their use of analgesics over a relatively long period in pregnancy, 6 to 8 weeks or so. Acetaminophen does not produce a long-term reduction in pain and fever because it is excreted from the body quickly, and so exposures in pregnancy are short and vary in their timing. That timing may matter for the male reproductive organs as they develop.

There’s one other wild card. You may not have known that dyes used in food and clothing with a chemical structure called aniline can actually be converted in the human body to acetaminophen. Does that mean avoiding food dyes? We have a long, long way to go before I’d suggest that. Food dyes have created their own concerns; some have suggested eliminating them could reduce ADHD symptoms.272 Suffice it to say there are lower-hanging fruit in preventing endocrine disruption right now based on the available data, but it may add to the argument for consuming fewer highly processed foods.

The more compelling argument would be to reduce unnecessary analgesic consumption. Bernard Jégou and his col­leagues at the Université de Rennes in France have shown ibuprofen to induce a syndrome like that found in older men in which their testosterone is clinically in the normal range but only because the hormone that stimulates production of testosterone (called luteinizing hormone) is revved up. The dysfunctional communication between the pituitary gland and testicle is called compensated hypogonadism. That seems innocent enough, but compensated hypogonadism is associated with reduced libido, reduced fertility, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.273

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.