Volume 118, January 2015, Pages 309–314
Persistent organic pollutants in matched breast milk and infant faeces samples
Highlights
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- Persistent organic pollutants could be measured in faeces with reproducible results.
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- Infant faecal concentrations are highly predicted by maternal milk concentrations.
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- Two possible mechanisms are postulated for the correlation between milk and faeces.
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- Using faeces as an external measure of internal exposure in infants looks promising.
Abstract
Assessing
blood concentration of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in infants
is difficult due to the ethical and practical difficulties in obtaining
sufficient quantities of blood. To determine whether measuring POPs in
faeces might reflect blood concentration during infancy, we measured the
concentrations of a range of POPs (i.e. polychlorinated biphenyls
(PCBs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and organochlorine
pesticides (OCPs)) in a pilot study using matched breast milk and infant
faecal samples obtained from ten mother–child pairs. All infants were
breast fed, with 8 of them also receiving solid food at the time of
faecal sampling. In this small dataset faecal concentrations (range
0.01–41 ng g−1 lipid) are strongly associated with milk concentrations (range 0.02–230 ng g−1
lipid). Associations with other factors generally could not be detected
in this dataset, with the exception of a small effect of age or growth.
Different sources (external or internal) of exposure appeared to
directly influence faecal concentrations of different chemicals based on
different inter-individual variability in the faeces-to-milk
concentration ratio Rfm. Overall, the matrix of
faeces as an external measure of internal exposure in infants looks
promising for some chemicals and is worth assessing further in larger
datasets.
Keywords
- Infant;
- POPs;
- Blood concentration;
- Breast milk concentration;
- Faeces concentration
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