Posted on 08/06/2003 1:35:07 AM PDT by yonif
CHICAGO - Air pollution from the World Trade Center attacks may have resulted in smaller babies among pregnant women who were in or near the collapsing towers, preliminary research suggests.
Pregnant women in the study who were exposed to dirt and soot from the attacks faced double the risk of delivering babies who were up to about a half-pound smaller than babies born to women who weren't exposed.
The size differences suggest a condition called intrauterine growth restriction, or IUGR, which has been linked with exposure to air pollution.
Previous research has found that babies affected by IUGR may be at increased risk for heart disease, hypertension and other health problems in adulthood, said Dr. Philip Landrigan, chairman of Mount Sinai School of Medicine's community and preventive medicine department, and one of the researchers.
The study appears in today's Journal of the American Medical Association. It is one of several ongoing efforts to track the health effects of the World Trade Center attack.
The pregnancy research involved 182 women, including 12 who were in the towers on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists slammed hijacked jets into the buildings. Most others were within a half-mile of the site.
Their babies were compared with infants born at Mount Sinai's hospital in Manhattan to women who were pregnant during the attacks but weren't near the site.
Pregnant women in the study who were exposed to dirt and soot from the attacks faced double the risk of delivering babies who were up to about a half-pound smaller than babies born to women who weren't exposed.
Just what does this sentence mean? Were the babies a half-pound light, on average? Were twice as many babies a half-pound lighter than average? Were twice as many babies at risk of being a half pound lighter than the average, but were actually not below the average? It's impossible to say.
There may be something here, but trying to prove it with only 187 cases with all the confounding factors of stress, income variation, diet, age, and everything else you could imagine is nearly impossible. And then to pull air pollution out of that pile and point to it as the causative agent of some undefined effect is just fantasy.
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