14 DAY TRIAL // A recent paper in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives argues that exposure to a class of pollutants known as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs, for short) is likely to cause a drop in an individual's testosterone levels.
In their report, researchers detail that, as part of their investigation into how exposure to PCBs influences a person's hormonal balance, they measured the testosterone levels of 127 Mohawk boys whose ages ranged from 10 to 17.
The boys all lived on a reservation along the St. Lawrence River and blood samples analyzed during this study were collected between 1996 – 2000, Environmental Health News reports.
Half of the boys were found to have traces of 16 types of PCBs in their bodies. What's more, the scientists noticed that, the more exposure to PCBs these boys had suffered, the lower their testosterone levels were, the same source details.
More precisely, a 10% increase in exposure to PCBs was linked to a 5.6% drop in testosterone levels.
“Exposure to PCBs, particularly the more highly persistent congeners, may negatively influence testosterone levels among adolescent males,” the University of Albany specialists reportedly write in their paper.
The researchers believe that the boys became exposed to the pollutants after consuming noteworthy amounts of locally caught fish.
Thus, even if the use of PCBs in the process of manufacturing electrical equipment was banned back in 1977, these compounds accumulate in the environment and take a fairly long time to break down.
Hence, it is possible for them to constitute a threat to public health decades after they stopped being used in industrial processes, specialists explain.
Presently, it is unclear whether the PCBs in their bodies caused the 127 Mohawk boys to develop any serious health problems. Still, it is possible that the drop in testosterone levels they experienced during their youth had a negative effect on their overall health condition as adults.
The news that PCBs can toy with a person's hormonal balance comes shortly after one other investigation into how these compounds affect public health showed that children born to mothers who were exposed to PCBs during pregnancy were more likely to suffer from asthma.