Scientists report that prenatal exposure to a pesticide, Chlorpyrifos, used on many crops may be linked with abnormal changes in a child’s developing brain.
For this study, Virginia Rauh, ScD, professor and deputy director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, selected 20 children with high prenatal exposure and 20 with low prenatal exposure. She took MRIs of their brains when they were about 6 to 11 years old.
Compared to children with low prenatal exposure, those with high exposure had abnormalities in the cortex, witch helps govern intelligence, personality, muscle movement, and other tasks.
The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ Early Edition.