We had a story in this morning’s Gazette about another troublesome study of C8′s potential human health effects, reporting:

Researchers have found that children exposed to the toxic chemical C8 may experience reduced effectiveness of childhood vaccinations, according to a significant new study being published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study discovered lower levels of antibodies that vaccines provide to fight infections among children with elevated exposures to C8 and similar chemicals that have been widely used in nonstick food packaging, stain-resistant textiles, nonstick cookware and water-resistant clothing.

Harvard University researchers warned that the results, if replicated in future studies, could indicate that perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, are related to much broader immune system problems beyond the two vaccines they studied.

“These findings suggest a decreased effect of childhood vaccines and may reflect a more general immune system deficit,” wrote Dr. Philippe Grandjean, lead author and an adjunct professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health.

You can read the paper yourself here.

But there’s another paper just out in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives that is also worth a look. That paper reported:

In summary, we observed that children had higher PFOA concentrations compared to their mothers. The ratio was the highest among children up to age five years where, on average, children had PFOA serum concentrations 44% higher than their mothers. The ratio was significantly higher for boys compared to girls for children aged >5 years. In a population exposed to elevated PFOA concentrations via contaminated drinking water, children seemed to concentrate the chemical more than their mothers up to about age 12. This is probably due to exposure via drinking water as well as exposure in utero and via breast milk. Children had higher PFOS concentrations than their mothers and this persisted at least until 19 years of age, with on average concentrations in children 42% higher than in their mothers. In utero and lactational exposure appears to make less of a contribution for PFOS than PFOA. Further studies are warranted on the child-mother PFAA relationship to understand how children’s exposure and rate of uptake vary as they grow.

We’ve got our initial news story online from this morning’s press conference up in Wood County, reporting:

A three-person team of scientists has found a “probable link” between C8 and high blood pressure among pregnant women, but no such link between exposure to the chemical and other reproductive effects, including low birth weight, miscarriage and birth defects.

Members of the C8 Science Panel issued the findings, which are the first major conclusions of their six-year study of the DuPont Co. chemical.

Reports of the panel’s first “probable link” findings were filed this morning with Wood Circuit Judge J.D. Beane and were being released to the media at a press conference at a local conference center.

Along with four reports on their probable link findings, C8 Science Panel members were also issuing new “status reports” related to updated figures on C8 blood levels in Mid-Ohio Valley residents, outlining a connection between C8 exposure and thyroid disease, and a more detailed look at C8 and reproductive health outcomes.

The first-ever C8 “probable link” reports are on the C8 Science Panel’s website here, here, here and here. And their latest status reports are here, here and here.

Big news coming on Monday: The C8 Science Panel plans to release its first conclusions about whether there is a “probable link” between DuPont’s toxic chemical and any adverse health effects. According to a media advisory:

On the morning of Monday, December 5, the first C8 Science Panel reports on whether or not there is a probable link between C8 and human disease will be delivered to the Wood County Court. Probable link reports to be covered on Monday will include reproductive outcomes only; other probable link outcomes will be delivered at a later date as more research is completed.

The panel plans a press conference Monday morning to discuss the findings.

Under the terms of the 2004 class-action settlement, the Science Panel was set up to determine if there is a probable link between C8 and human disease. If there is, then DuPont is on the hook for more than $200 million to set up a medical monitoring program for Mid-Ohio Valley residents whose water supplies were polluted with C8.

As we’ve explained before:

The term “probable link” isn’t a standard one for scientists who study toxic chemical exposure. It’s defined in the DuPont legal settlement as whether, “based upon the weight of the available scientific evidence, it is more likely than not that there is a link between exposure to C8 and a particular human disease” among Mid-Ohio Valley residents taking part in the suit.

The Science Panel has said it would release all of its final probable link determinations by July 2012.

There’s a fascinating new paper out on the website of the journal Environmental Health, reporting “for the very first time a significant association between serum PFC levels and the risk” of breast cancer.

The paper is available here, and it was written by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Interestingly, the paper examines breast cancer among the  Inuit population of Greenland and Canada. The authors offered some cautions:

There are some weaknesses in the presented study. Firstly, the few subjects involved, 31 cases and 115 controls, gives a poor statistically power. However, the highly related serum PFC levels with the risk of BC cancer did persist in all our effort to make up a better case control frequency match.

And they also said:

The recent increase in BC incidence might be explained by the high burden of legacy POPs and increased exposure to new emerging POPs such as PFCs together with the recent transition in the Inuit diet from the traditional marine food to more western food and lifestyle factors such as smoking and alcohol intake.

While members of the C8 Science Panel were having their first-ever public meetings last week in the Parkersburg area,  the fine folks at West Virginia University’s Department of Community Medicine were churning out another study of C8′s potential health effects.

The latest work, published in the journal Clinical Epidemiology, reports:

We found that serum levels of perfluoroalkyl chemicals, including perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctane sulfonate, were positively associated with hyperuricemia. This association appeared to be independent of confounders such as age, gender, race-ethnicity, body mass index, diabetes, hypertension, and serum cholesterol.

The study explains:

Serum uric acid is a novel biomarker, even mild elevations of which has been implicated in the development of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, and chronic kidney disease.

Now, the C8 Science Panel previously reported on an association between C8 exposure and uric acid levels among residents of the Mid-Ohio Valley. But the new WVU study looked at data from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys, and found an association between uric acid levels and C8 at C8 levels similar to those found in the general U.S. population, reporting:

Our results demonstrate that elevated levels of perfluoroalkyl chemicals are associated with hyperuricemia even at low perfluoroalkyl chemical exposure levels as seen in the US general population.

The C8 Science Panel must be getting the message … because their latest Status Report — just filed in Wood Circuit Court this afternoon — actually contains some data to back up their conclusions.

This Status Report is an update of the panel’s previous report on pregnancy outcomes, which was released in July. This is a broader look than the previous report, using a linkage between C8 Health Project data and state birth records to, among other things, follow women from one residence to another and estimate their C8 intake from local water supplies.

The Science Panel’s summary says of this new analysis, looking at stillbirths, pregnancy-induced hypertension, preterm birth, and several indicators of the infant’s size, including low birth weight and average birth weight:

Overall, these results provide little or no support for an association between PFOA exposure and any adverse effects on pregnancy.

But it also includes these interesting tidbits:

… But there was some indication that male infants with the highest exposure to PFOA weighed slightly less at birth.

… There was some indication that female infants with the highest exposure to PFOA weighed slightly less at birth.

The panel said of these findings:

These small differences in birth weight with conflicting patterns across the two analyses, one limited to male births and the other [to] female births, are of uncertain significance.

On Monday and Tuesday evenings, the three-person C8 Science Panel will for the first time in its more than five years of activity hold public meetings to talk with the people of the Mid-Ohio Valley about its work.

Meetings are scheduled for Monday at Blennerhassett Middle School Auditorium in Parkersburg and Tuesday night at Meigs Local Middle School Auditorium in Pomeroy, Ohio. Both meetings start at 6 p.m.

We’ve written before here about how the C8 Science Panel’s periodic “Status Reports” are pretty bare bones, and don’t contain any data that would really allow anyone to critique the judgments being made by the panel.

And now, a series of new presentations — delivered by Science Panel members at an International Society for Environmental Epidemiology meeting last week in Barcelona, Spain — provides some interesting examples of how the panel’s Status Reports to the community differ from the data they report to other scientists in journals and at academic conferences. Here’s what I mean:

– Back in July, the Science Panel issued a Status report called Serum PFOA and liver function markers in the blood of adults in the Mid-Ohio Valley that found an association between higher C8 levels and higher levels of one liver function marker, ALT. The panel also reported that neither of the other two markers examined, GGT or bilirubin, showed a clear relationship with C8, but provided no data to support that conclusion.

In a later interview with me, Science Panel member Tony Fletcher kind of hedged, though, when pressed about these findings … and now we know why.

As part of a presentation in Barcelona, Dr. Fletcher released some data results from this particular Science Panel study. I’ve posted a copy of this presentation here. This is what the new presentation — for the first time — says:

– There is some suggestion of an association between PFOA and GGT in linear regression models; however, these were not replicated in logistic regressions.

– The relationship between PFOA and direct bilirubin is suggestive of an increase in bilirubin [with] increasing PFOA concentations up to 40 ng/ML, followed by a decrease in bilirubin after this peak.

– Negative associations observed in some occupational studies might be due [to] inclusion of subjects in the higher range of exposure missing the first part of the inverse U-shaped curve.

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DuPont Co.’s Washington Works plant near Parkersburg.

For the first time since they announced their initial study plans five years ago, the C8 Science Panel is actually going to meet with and hear from residents of the Mid-Ohio Valley.

The three-member panel just issued this news release, saying:

The C8 Science Panel is organizing two public forums for those interested in hearing more about the status of its work. The public will have a chance to ask the C8 Science Panelists questions, and hear their explanation of the scientific process that goes into making the determination of whether there is a probable link between C8 exposure and human disease.

The C8 Science Panel (Dr. Tony Fletcher, Dr. Kyle Steenland, and Dr. David Savitz) will be present with a complete update on the progress they’ve made so far, and the steps they are taking toward the end result. If you have an interest in the C8 investigation process, we invite you to attend one of these meetings. There are two public meetings each starting at 6pm and planned to last an hour and a half

The meeting schedule:

Monday, September 26, 6pm
Blennerhassett Middle School Auditorium
444 Jewel Road
Parkersburg, WV 26101

Tuesday, September 27, 6 pm
Meigs Local Middle School Auditorium
42353 Charles Chancey Drive
Pomeroy, OH 45769

It’s not clear from the press release how much of the 90-minute meetings the Science Panel plans to take up with their own presentations — and how much time they plan to allow for members of the public to ask questions or make statements. It’s also not clear if the Science Panel is going to make some sort of record — a video recording or a transcript — of the meeting, or create a public archive of any materials provided to them by citizens who appear at the meetings.

A separate statement that was emailed to the media does say:

The format for both meetings will be exactly the same, so interested attendees are asked to choose one meeting most convenient for them in order to maximize participation.

The forums will consist of a short introduction by the Panelists including updates of where the research is now, what they’ve done to get to this point, and when final results can be expected. Questions will then be taken from the public.

That statement also says:

No new results or conclusions will be announced at the meeting. This is rather an opportunity, while the work is still ongoing, for dialogue between the local community and the Science Panel. The Science Panel hopes to have the opportunity to learn more of community concerns and explain more of the process of the science, the results and their careful consideration in this landmark case.

These meetings were scheduled only after Wood Circuit Judge J.D. Beane blasted Science Panel members Tony Fletcher, Kyle Steenland and David Savitz at a court hearing in May for not moving fast enough and not doing enough to update the community on their work.

There’s another significant new study out from the folks at West Virginia University’s C8 Health Project, who are churning out tons of important research about the potential toxic effects of the DuPont chemical C8.

This one is called Perfluoroalkyl Chemicals and Chronic Kidney Disease in U.S. Adults (subscription required) and was published last week in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The study examined data for more than 4,500 adults from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey, or NHANES, and found associations between higher levels of C8 and PFOS exposure and chronic kidney disease, or CKD.

These associations were independent of possible other factors, such as age, sex, race/ethnicity, body mass index, diabetes, hypertension and cholesterol levels.  One caution is that the NHANES data, because it measures C8 levels in blood and CKD at the same time, it cannot tell us which came first — the chemical exposure or the kidney disease.

Still, author Anoop Shankar and colleagues report:

Our results contribute to the emerging data on the health effects of PFCs, suggesting for the first time that PFOA and PFOS are potentially related to CKD.

… Our findings are of public health importance because serum PFCs appear to be positively related to kidney disease even at relatively low background exposure levels in the U.S. general population.

They continued:

… If our findings are replicated in future prospective studies, the population attributable risk of CKD by PFC exposure would be high. This is unlike findings form certain other specific populations that were exposed to very high serum PFC levels through local environmental contamination. Also, because PFCs are manmade, it may be possible to remove this excess exposure risk.

This new WVU study comes on the heels of the C8 Science Panel’s report outlining associations between chemical exposure and kidney cancer deaths in DuPont workers (see here and here).  So far, though, I don’t believe that we have seen any results from the Science Panel on chronic kidney disease among the non-worker population in the Mid-Ohio Valley.

Two weeks ago, we reported on the findings of a West Virginia University study that raised serious concerns about the relationship between exposure to C8 and the function of the thyroid gland.

And today, the C8 Science Panel has made public a summary of its latest report on the matter — raising more questions about how exposure to C8 and similar chemicals affects thyroid function and thyroid disease in kids.

The most significant new piece of information?

Science Panel members found a 50 percent higher risk of thyroid disease among kids exposed to higher levels of C8.

In a three-page status report, the Science Panel concludes its latest results:

… Suggest that exposure during childhood to two perfluoroalkyl acids, PFOS and PFNA, may be capable of disturbing thyroid hormone levels. Reported thyroid disease in children was found to be associated with PFOA but not PFOS or PFNA,

The panel cautioned that “the results are not sufficient to prove that PFOA is leading to increased thyroid disease” but also concluded:

Taken together, these new findings suggest that normal thyroid function may be affected by exposure to one or more of the family of pefluoroalkyl acids.

The Science Panel explains the importance of any connection between C8 exposure levels and the thyroid this way:

Disturbances to the thyroid system, particularly in children, may have a number of negative effects, as thyroid hormones play important roles in regulating metabolism, growth and development, especially in normal brain maturation and development.

In this particular study, the Science Panel compared blood levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone, or TSH, and total thyroxine (TT4) to levels of C8 and similar chemicals in the blood of 10,725 children ages 1 to 18 years. They also compared the hormone levels to the C8 in the blood of mothers at the time of pregnancy.

And, the Science Panel looked at the number of children for whom a diagnosed thyroid disease was reported.

The three-scientist panel found that thyroid disease “was positively associated with” C8 levels in the child “with borderline statistical significance.”  The panel reported a 50 percent higher risk for hypothyroidism for those with higher levels of C8 versus lower levels of the chemical.  Similar associates were found for both C8 levels in the child’s blood and the mother’s blood while pregnant.

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