Prenatal exposure to perfluoroalkyl substances predicts multimodal brain structural and functional outcomes in children aged 5 years: a birth cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are ubiquitous persistent organic pollutants associated with adverse health outcomes in humans. Although they are associated with autism spectrum disorder and behavioural outcomes, whether PFAS affect brain development is unclear. We aimed to characterise the relationship between maternal PFAS and brain structure and function in typically developing children. Methods This study was set within the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, a prospective observational study that enrolled mothers from three clinics in Turku, Finland, during their first trimester of pregnancy. Maternal serum samples at gestational week 24 were analysed for PFAS by mass spectrometry and, at age 5 years, children were assessed through structural, diffusion-weighted, and functional MRI. Whole-brain voxel-level and vertex-level maps of grey matter volume, white matter fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity, and cortical thickness and surface area were combined to compute ten independent components. Data were analysed by correlation network, elastic net regression, and multivariate linear regression with multiple testing correction. Findings Pregnant mothers were enrolled into the birth cohort study between Dec 1, 2011, and April 30, 2015, and study visits at age 5 years took place between Oct 1, 2017, and March 31, 2020. This analysis involved 51 mother–child dyads for whom maternal PFAS concentrations and structural MRI data for the child were available. PFAS concentrations in maternal serum samples were mostly 0–1 ng/mL. Maternal perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA; R 2 =0·13, β=0·39 [95% CI 0·09–0·69], p adj =0·024) and linear perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA; 0·13, 0·36 [0·09–0·63], p adj =0·022) linearly predicted a multimodal component dominated by corpus callosal integrity, whereas branched perfluorohexanesulphonic acid (PFHxS; R 2 =0·12, β=0·31, p adj =0·036) and branched PFOA ( R 2 =0·14, β=0·36, p adj =0·016) predicted a component comprising mainly occipital cortex volume and surface area. Branched perfluorooctanesulphonic acid predicted hypothalamic microstructure ( R 2 =0·10, β=0·29, p=0·026). PFNA, linear PFOA, and branched PFOA are associated with increased functional connectivity in the right precentral gyrus, whereas branched PFHxS predicts decreased connectivity in the intracalcerine cortices. Associations were not influenced by sex assigned at birth, but were related to PFAS chemical structure. Interpretation We show an association between prenatal PFAS exposure and brain developmental outcomes in children. These findings are pertinent given the ubiquitous circulation of PFAS in humans and the extreme environmental persistence of these substances. Funding The Horizon Europe programme of the EU.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".