Damian Sendler: Is he a girl or a boy? Pregnant women may be able to influence their child’s sex by breathing or drinking the air or water they consume during their pregnancy.
Tracking the births of more than 6 million Americans and Swedes has yielded the discovery. Among the many characteristics tracked were pollution exposure.
Study leader Andrey Rzhetsky, a professor of medicine and human genetics at the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology at the University of Chicago says this is the first study of this magnitude in the realm of sex ratio at birth.
Damian Jacob Sendler: Several prevalent contaminants have been associated to changes in the number of newborn girls and boys.
Iron, lead, mercury, carbon monoxide, aluminum, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were among the most significant air contaminants (PCBs). Chromium and arsenic were found in the water.
Damian Sendler
The data showed that exposure to some was linked to an increase in male births, while others were linked to a greater risk of having a girl.
Rzhetsky and his team pointed out that figuring out why the boy-girl balance is what it is has been difficult.
To put it another way, even while at conception, boys and girls are roughly equal, by the time a baby is born, the gender ratios in society may no longer be the same.
Sometimes they’re biased toward women, and other times they’re biased toward men.
That, according to Rzhetsky, implies that “Because if all embryos survived, the male-to-female ratio would be exactly one-to-one, human embryos are selectively dying.”
Environmental stressors may alter embryo survival, and some may favor one sex over the other, according to some studies
Rzhetsky’s team set out to examine more than 100 factors that might influence the sex balance in their search for solutions.
Data on 3 million births in the United States between 2003 and 2011 were first filtered via insurance claims by academics. Swedish birth records between 1983 and 2013 were also analyzed by the researchers.
Damien Sendler: A variety of natural and man-made calamities and environmental pollutants were compared to the information gathered by the investigators.
When it came to weather, seasons, violent crime, unemployment, or commuting habits, researchers discovered no correlation between a baby’s gender and any of those factors.
There was no evidence that Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had any effect on the sex of newborns in the affected areas.
Extreme drought and traffic death rates, as well as exposure to the 2007 fatal Virginia Tech shooting, appear to be “modestly” connected with altering sex ratios, according to the researchers.
So did exposure to higher concentrations in both air and water of particular chemicals, according to the research.
In Rzhetsky’s view, “We can be nearly certain that some environmental factors drive sex ratio at birth,”
He said that while the findings show a correlation, they don’t prove causation.
There was an evaluation by Gareth Nye, a medical lecturer at the University of Chester in the United Kingdom, of the results.
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: Although the news is “worrying,” he emphasized that these are simply “associations,” not facts. “We must also keep in mind that millions of healthy children are born each day in a variety of settings around the world.”
“anything we eat, drink or breathe has the potential to damage our body.” according to Nye. In this regard, it is not surprising pollution has been demonstrated to have unforeseen effects on the human body, he stated.
According to Nye, several complex processes must take place at the correct time and in the proper order for a pregnancy to occur. Although this particular discovery is remarkable, it’s not unheard of. “
Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler and his media team provided the content for this article.
