Girl, Disrupted: When chemicals act like hormones

A certain class of industrial chemicals, known as endocrine-disrupting compounds or hormone disruptors can throw off the balance between hormones and the development of normal body functioning.

Bisphenol A, phthalates, DDT, and dioxin are examples of chemicals that are hormone disruptors.  Exposure to hormone disruptors puts women and girls at greater risk for developing reproductive health problems, such as early puberty, infertility and breast cancer. The risks are greater if exposure occurs during fetal development. All those facts can be found in a new report, Girl, Disrupted, released by the Collaborative on Health and the Environment.

The report shines a spotlight on the impact of hormone disrupting chemicals and female reproductive health problems. The report was written for a general audience in an effort to make the issue of chemical impacts on reproductive health more widely known and better understood.  Girl, Disrupted is based on a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in Fertility and Sterility in October 2008.  

Conception rates fell by 44 percent in the United States between 1960 and 2002, and the number of couples reporting fertility problems has increased over the last two decades.

The sharpest increase in reported infertility was seen in younger women, under age 25.

The report exposes as myths common understandings of how the body protects itself or a fetus from chemical exposure. The lesson of DES (diethylstilbestrol) is presented as an example of how a hormone-disrupting chemical can have no effect on the pregnant woman, but is identified as the origin of adult disease diagnosed decades later. (Bisphenol A, another hormone-disrupting chemical that is now used as a plasticizer, was shelved for medical purposes once DES was invented.)  DES was prescribed by doctors for more than 20 years to an estimated 5-10 million pregnant women and their children until it was discovered in 1971 that  “DES Daughters” were found to have a rare form of vaginal cancer and other reproductive tract abnormalities that were traced back to fetal exposures to DES.

Girl, Disrupted makes a convincing case that common wisdom that guides our society’s use of chemicals is wrong.  Whether it’s the myth of the impermeable shield of the placenta, which is thought to block chemicals from fetuses, or the myth of the "dose equals the poison," which overlooks the significant effects from low-dose exposure to hormone disrupting chemicals, the harm from chemicals on female reproductive health and development is alarmingly misunderstood.