Study Links Prenatal Exposure to PCBs to Childhood Reading Trouble
From Times staff and wire reports
Children exposed before birth to PCBs are more likely to have trouble reading when they reach school age, according to a report in the Sept. 12 New England Journal of Medicine. Previous research had found that PCBs, a common pollutant, harm intellectual development. The latest study found signs that this damage persists through childhood.
Psychologists at Wayne State University in Detroit tested 212 children whose mothers had eaten PCB-tainted fish from Lake Michigan while they were pregnant. At age 11, the children with the highest exposure were three times as likely as other children to have relatively low IQ scores and twice as likely to lag at least two years behind in reading comprehension.
