Essential and Non-Essential Metals in Children's Intellectual Functioning: A Multi-Media Biomarker Approach from A Mexico City Birth Cohort.

BACKGROUND Metal exposures impact children's intellectual functioning from pregnancy through early childhood and beyond, being historically evaluated with single-pollutant models which might create errors estimating individual metal impacts beyond other correlated metals which arise from the same shared sources. AIM We evaluated the effect of exposure to non-essential and essential metals on the cognitive function of Mexican children at 48 months of age. METHOD ology: We included persons from the Programming Research in Obesity, Growth, Environment, and Social Stressors (PROGRESS) longitudinal birth cohort in Mexico City with biomarker data on 13 non-essential (lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, strontium, barium, and cesium) and essential (manganese, copper, selenium, molybdenum, magnesium, and zinc) metals during pregnancy and early childhood. We assessed the child's intellectual functioning with McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities. We created a multi-media biomarker (MMB) index utilizing the Weighted Quantile Sum Regression (WQS) method. We utilized generalized linear models to estimate the change in the General Cognitive Index (GCI) per interquartile increase in the MMB index(β) and corresponding 95% confidence intervals(CIs) in single and multipollutant models. RESULTS After adjusting for confounders in multipollutant models, MMB-cadmium (β: -1.52, 95%CI: -3.03, -0.01) and MMB-arsenic (β: -1.53; 95%CI: -3.02, -0.03) showed significant negative effects on intellectual functioning. In contrast, MMB-manganese (β: 2.28; 95%CI: 0.77, 3.77), MMB-selenium (β:2.07, 95%CI: 0.69, 3.43), and MMB-molybdenum (β: 1.76; 95%CI: 0.21, 3.31) were the metals with the highest positive effects. We did find variations comparing results from single and multi-pollutant models, indicating the presence of multipollutant confounding. CONCLUSION Our study adds to the current body of literature about the co-pollutant confounding problem of evaluating metals and children's intellectual functioning, as well as the effect of understudied toxic metals of public health interest, such as barium and cesium as candidates that warrant further investigation for a possible role in children´s intellectual functioning.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Environmental Research

• Publication date

  2025-07-10

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.envres.2025.122323PMID 40651758PMCID PMC12973447
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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