Is a Common Household Plastic Causing Your Child’s Asthma?

If your child is exposes to a commonplace chemical early in life, they are more likely to develop asthma. This is according to a new study that found exposure of young children to bisphenol A (BPA), a common ingredient in household plastics, has been linked to the children’s later development of asthma.

Testing 568 children and their mothers in New York City, the study is the first to link early childhood exposure to with asthma, though other studies with lab mice have found a similar link. According to the team from Columbia University, the wellbeing of children with higher levels of BPA at ages 3, 5 and 7 was more at risk of developing the respiratory disease when they were between 5 and 12.

According to Kathleen Donohue, an instructor in clinical medicine at Columbia University Medical Centre and lead author of the study, ‘We saw increased risk of asthma at fairly routine, low doses of BPA.’ You can find the chemical in many household polycarbonate plastics, as well as some canned foods and beverages, paper receipts and dental sealants.

The study, which was published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, has been praised by wellness experts who, for decades, have been trying to figure out why asthma have skyrocketed in children worldwide since the 1980s. A lot of researchers believe that it might have something to do with early-life exposures and changes in immune systems causing inflammation, and this study has helped that idea along.

Kim Harley, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies environmental chemicals and children’s health but did not participate in the new research, commented that though the research did not prove that BPA causes asthma or wheezing, ‘it’s an important study because we don’t know a lot right now about how BPA affects immune response and asthma.’ She added, ‘They measured BPA at different ages, measured asthma and wheeze at multiple points, and still found consistent associations.’

However, even though the researchers took BPA measurements at multiple times, Joe Braun, an epidemiology professor at Brown University who was not involved with the research, explained that it’s tricky to pin down exposure levels. ‘BPA has a short half life, so whatever we take in today will be gone in about 24 hours,’ he said, adding that the testing was ‘as good as we’re going to get for this type of study’ but ‘we’re still not accurately capturing exposure.’