Does early life phthalate exposure mediate racial disparities in children’s cognitive abilities?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early life exposure to phthalates may be associated with reduced cognition. However, it is unknown if disproportionate exposure to phthalates contributes to racial disparities in children's intellectual abilities. Methods: We used data from 253 mother-child pairs in Cincinnati, OH (the Health Outcomes and Measures of the Environment study, 2003-2006). We measured urinary concentrations of 11 phthalate metabolites twice during pregnancy and up to six times in childhood. We evaluated children's cognitive abilities at ages 5 and 8 years. Using mediation models, we quantified covariate-adjusted direct and indirect effects of race on children's Full-Scale Intelligence Quotient (IQ) scores for individual phthalate metabolite concentrations during gestation and childhood. Results: Average IQ scores among Black children (n = 90) were 7.0 points lower (95% confidence interval [CI] = -12, -1.8) than among White children (n = 145) after adjustment for socioeconomic factors. Urinary monobenzyl phthalate and monoethyl phthalate (MEP) concentrations during gestation and childhood were higher among Black than White children. We did not observe evidence that phthalate concentrations mediated the race-IQ association, with the exception of MEP. Childhood MEP concentrations partially mediated the race-IQ association. For instance, each 10-fold increase in MEP concentrations at age 2 years contributed to a 1.9-point disparity in IQ scores between Black and White children (95% CI = -4.7, 0.7). Other phthalate metabolite concentrations during pregnancy or childhood did not mediate the race-IQ association. Conclusions: Despite observing racial disparities in exposure to some phthalates and IQ, we found little evidence that phthalates contribute to IQ disparities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".