The case summed up Researchers at the University of Bergen and the Institute of Public Health have analyzed data from 1,200 Bergen children to examine the development of puberty in Norway. They have found a connection between the level of environmental toxins (PFAS) in the blood and later puberty in boys. PFAS are chemical substances that are used in many everyday products, and which take a long time to disappear from the environment. The researchers cannot say that PFAS is the reason for late puberty, but they see a clear connection. Future research will look at how different groups of environmental toxins can affect each other and puberty. The summary is made by an AI service from OpenAI. The content is quality assured by news’s journalists before publication. Ingvild Halsør Forthun is a doctor at the children’s ward at Haukeland Hospital, and is concerned with hormonal disorders in children. In recent years, she and other researchers at the University of Bergen and the Institute of Public Health have worked to analyze the results of unique data on Norwegian children and young people. In 2016, 1,200 Bergen children between the ages of 6 and 16 were recruited for the second growth study in Bergen to find out more about the development of puberty in Norway. One of the things they wanted to find out is whether environmental toxins such as PFAS can affect puberty. An answer has now been published in Environmental Science & Technology. 10 months – Our hypothesis was that PFAS can disrupt the hormonal balance. Based on animal studies, the hypothesis was that it can delay puberty, says Ingvild Halsør Fortun. From before, there has not been much research into puberty in boys. What makes the research from Bergen extra unusual is that they have made very precise measurements of how far the boys have reached puberty. Among other things, they took an ultrasound of the testicles to find out exactly how big they were. They also measured the testosterone level and how much pubic hair the boys had. Photo: Ingvild S. Bruserud – It is more precise if you measure with ultrasound, Fortun tells. Then they compared how much PFAS the boys had in their blood with the age at which they reached puberty. The results strengthened the researchers’ hypothesis. – We looked at the boys between the ages of 9 and 14.5. The group with the highest level of PFAS reached puberty approximately 10 months later than the group with the lowest level of PFAS. Ingenious and problematic PFAS is actually a collection of over 10,000 chemical substances. They are used everywhere: in make-up, lunch boxes, measurements, jackets and carpets. What is brilliant about PFAS is that they make water and grease easily run off, for example, the Teflon pan. The problem is that the substance takes a long time to disappear. That is why they are called “aging chemicals”. And the chemicals are everywhere. As, for example, in Norwegian teenagers. PFAS have been found all over the world. Even places where no human lives. Photo: Agnieszka Iwanska / news – We have analyzed the blood for 19 PFAS, and there are over 10,000 different PFAS. So we don’t know how the others work, says Fortun. She emphasizes that they cannot establish that PFAS is the reason why someone reaches puberty late. – We cannot talk about cause and effect, but we see a clear connection between the level of PFAS and later puberty in these boys. – But what is the consequence of late puberty in boys? – It is associated with an increased incidence of anxiety and depression and affects bone growth. But it is uncertain whether it is relevant in this context. So we don’t know. Cause or connection? The more fire constables who take part in extinguishing a fire, the greater the damage. We have clear figures on this, the connection is obvious. Does that mean that you are wise to specify that you want the help of as few fire constables as possible when you call 110 because your house is on fire? No. And why don’t you do that? Because you have understood the difference between correlation and causality. We can establish that there is a correlation between the number of fire constables and the size of the damage – that is, that there is some connection between the two phenomena. The question is whether there is a so-called causal connection, that A (the number of fire constables) is the cause of B (major damage)? Common sense tells us that this is not the case. We must take factor C into account, namely the size of the fire. The bigger the fire, the more fire marshals are dispatched. But they cannot prevent the fact that a larger fire causes greater damage anyway. Thus, it is C (the size of the fire) – the underlying cause – that governs both A (the number of fire marshals) and B (the size of the damage). It is often easy to find correlation, then you count and measure different phenomena, and find the connection that way. Finding out whether the connections are causal, whether A really leads to B, is often much more complicated. Quick summary: When two phenomena vary together, i.e. that A and B become larger or smaller at the same time, there is correlation. When A becomes larger or smaller because B becomes larger or smaller, there is causality. Opposite in girls A study from northern Norway that was published earlier this year shows that girls with a lot of environmental toxins in their blood reported that they got their periods earlier than others. There they used questionnaires and hormone measurements of young people in the first stage of secondary school. 16 per cent of the girls said they got their periods before they were 11 years old. They also had higher levels of PFAS in them. – In our study, we found different connections between environmental toxins and hormones in boys and girls. This has also been described in other studies, and is probably not so surprising since there are rather large differences in particular sex hormone levels and their regulation between the sexes, says Professor Guri Grimnes at the University of Tromsø. Among other things, Guri Grimnes has researched youth health, diabetes and vitamin D. Photo: Veronica Turnage / news She thinks it would have been very interesting if one could measure the PFAS level in children before puberty started, and see how it affects development. Ingvild Halsør Fortun at the University of Bergen says that up until now a lot of research has been done on one and the same environmental poison. But now the researchers have started to look at how several different groups of poisons work. – One believes that the various environmental toxins can affect each other. So how this cocktail can affect puberty in total will be our next step. Published 30.09.2024, at 20.34
ttn-69
Teenage boys with the most PFAS in their blood reached puberty at the latest – news Trøndelag – Local news, TV and radio
