Dioxins In Food Chain May Cause Breastfeeding Ills
An explanation for the trouble some women experience while breastfeeding or if they don’t produce enough milk may be caused by the exposure to dioxins.
Corresponding author B. Paige Lawrence, Ph.D., associate professor of Environmental Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology at URMC, believes that these findings, although only demonstrated in mice at this point, begin to address an area of health that impacts millions of women.
According to her the cause of this problem mother experience worldwide “is unclear, though it has been suggested that environmental contaminants might play a role. We showed definitively that a known and abundant pollutant has an adverse effect on the way mammary glands develop during pregnancy.”
Dioxins are generated mostly by the incineration of certain plastics, substance people encounter in their diet. When air emissions settle on farm fields and where livestock graze, dioxins get into the food supply. After ingurgitation, the natural elimination takes place very slowly.
The novel discovery that dioxin impairs the normal development of mammary glands during pregnancy, was made by Lawrence’s laboratory in 2004. following that discovery, researchers have linked dioxin to a profound effect on breast tissue, by causing mammary cells to stop their natural cycle of proliferation as early as six days into pregnancy and lasting through mid-pregnancy.
Another significant aspect in the study is the timing of dioxin: if exposure occurs very early in pregnancy, lab experiments showed that sometimes the mammary glands can partially recover from the cellular injury, for example.
Lawrence stated that “Our goal is not to find a safe window of exposure for humans, but to better understand how dioxins affect our health”. Therefore, much of the research Lawrence team made is based on AhR, aryl hydrocarbon receptor, a transcription factor. When pollutants enter the body they bind to AhR, which then turns on certain genes responsible for detoxification. Dioxin impairs the ability to fight off infection, although it activates AhR.
What controls the differentiation process is going to be the next subject for a further research. What remains to be understood is whether the toxic harm is occurring directly in the breast, or if it occurs throughout the entire body but has a unique manifestation in the fatty mammary tissue.
The National Institutes of Health, the URMC Environmental Health Sciences Center and the Art BeCAUSE Foundation of Boston supported the research.
