When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had enough on my mind. I didn’t have much time to think much about plastic. I knew vaguely that plastics can release estrogen-mimicking substances like bisphenol A (BPA) into our food and I’d heard that they might cause genital defects in male fetuses. But once my husband and I had the 20-week ultrasound and knew we were having a girl, I thought I could stop searching for products in cardboard or glass. It was just too hard. Everything is packaged in plastic these days.

Apparently I jumped the gun.

Scientific papers warning about the hazards of prenatal exposure to BPA have been coming out in a steady stream, with a string of particularly damning ones appearing over the last 18 months in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Last month one in particular caught my eye: a study of how prenatal BPA exposure changes the brain. The results were enough to make this neuroscientist pause.

While we tend to think of estrogens as the sex hormones that manage ovulation and pregnancy, these molecules also have powerful and direct effects on the brain. Many types of neurons have estrogen receptors on their outer surface. While there are several kinds of estrogen receptors in the brain, all bind to estrogens (and other molecules that resemble estrogens) and all trigger changes within their neurons as a result. These small changes can potentially add up to alter how entire neural circuits function. In fact, estrogens influence a wide range of skills and behaviors – from cognitive function to mood regulation and even fine motor control. While we don’t yet know why estrogens have such a broad and powerful influence on the brain, it does appear that we should think twice before mucking around with estrogen levels, particularly in the developing brain.

BPA and other compounds found in plastics resemble estrogens. The similarity is close enough to fool estrogen receptors, which bind to these foreign molecules and interpret them as additional estrogen. Although BPA has been used commercially as a dental sealant and liner for food containers (among many other uses) since the 1960s, the health consequences of this case of mistaken identity are just beginning to be understood.

In the PNAS paper published last month, a group of scientists headed by Dr. Frances Champagne at Columbia report the effect of prenatal BPA exposure on mice. They fed pregnant laboratory mice one of three daily doses of BPA (2, 20, or 200 μg/kg) or a control product without BPA. These are not high doses of BPA. Based on the amount of BPA found in humans, scientists estimate that we are exposed to about 400 μg/kg per day. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reached their own estimate by testing the amount of BPA in various foods and then approximating how much of these people consume daily. Their calculations put the figure at around 0.19 μg/kg daily for adults. This discrepancy (400 versus 0.19) is one of many points of contention between the FDA, the packaging industry, and the scientific community on the subject of BPA.

Champagne and her colleagues fed their mice BPA on each of the twenty days of mouse gestation. (That’s right, ladies: mouse pregnancies last less than three weeks.) After each mouse pup was born, the scientists either studied its behavior or sacrificed it and examined its brain.

What did they find? Prenatal BPA exposure had a noticeable impact on mouse brains, even at the lowest dose. They found BPA-induced changes in the number of new estrogen receptors being made in all three brain areas they examined: the prefrontal cortex, hypothalamus, and hippocampus. These effects were complex and differed depending on the gender of the animal, the brain area, the BPA dose, and the type of estrogen receptor. Still, in several cases the researchers found a surprising pattern. Without BPA-exposure, female mice typically made more new estrogen receptors than their male counterparts. The same was true for mice given the highest BPA dose. But among pups exposed to the two lowest BPA doses, male mice made more estrogen receptors than females! This sex-difference reversal stemmed from changes in both genders; male mice made more estrogen receptors than normal at these doses while female mice made fewer than their norm.

Champagne and colleagues also observed and recorded several behaviors of the mice in different circumstances. For most behaviors, males and females were naturally different from one another.  Just as human boys tend to chase each other more than girls do, male mouse pups chased more than females. Unexposed male mice sniffed a new mouse more than unexposed females did. They showed more anxiety-like behavior in an open space and were less active in their home cages. Prenatal BPA treatment reversed these natural sex differences. Exposed female mice did more sniffing, acted more anxious, and ran around less than their exposed male counterparts. And at the highest prenatal BPA dose, the male mice chased each other as rarely as the females did. In one case, BPA treatment affected the two genders similarly; both sexes were less aggressive than normal at the two lower doses and more aggressive than normal at the highest dose.

Overall, the results of the study are complex and it might be easy to ignore them because they don’t seem to tell a straightforward tale. Yet their findings can be summed up in a single sentence: BPA exposure in utero has diverse effects on the mouse brain and later behavior. Not only does the BPA ingested by the mom manage to affect the growing fetus, but those effects persist beyond the womb and past the end of the exposure to BPA.

Some will dismiss these results because they come from mice. After all, how much do we really resemble mice? Yet studies in monkeys have also found that BPA affects fetal development. And while mice and monkeys excrete BPA differently, they clear it at a similar rate — to each other and to human women. Results from correlational studies in humans also suggest that BPA exposure during development affects mood, anxiety and aggressiveness to varying degrees (depending on the child’s gender).

Still, there’s a lot we don’t know about the relevance of this study for humans. At the end of the day, mice aren’t humans and no one has agreed on how much BPA pregnant women ingest. Moreover, Champagne and colleagues examined only a small subset of the neural markers and behaviors that BPA might affect in mice. Perhaps the changes they describe are the worst of BPA’s effects, or perhaps they are only the tip of the iceberg. We don’t yet know.

What’s the upshot of all this? You may want to err on the side of caution, particularly if you’re pregnant. Avoid plastics when possible. Be aware of other sources of BPA like canned foods (which have plastic liners) and thermal receipts. Do what you can do and then try not to let it stress you out. If you’re pregnant, you already have enough on your mind.

As for my daughter, she seems to be fine despite her plasticized third trimester. While she doesn’t do much sniffing, she does occasionally slap my husband or me in the face. It could be the BPA making her aggressive. I choose to blame it on her sassy genes instead.

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Photo credit: .imelda on Flickr

Kundakovic M, Gudsnuk K, Franks B, Madrid J, Miller RL, Perera FP, & Champagne FA (2013). Sex-specific epigenetic disruption and behavioral changes following low-dose in utero bisphenol A exposure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110 (24), 9956-61 PMID: 23716699