Health Effects of Pesticides

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Aims: To evaluate the possible relationship between occupational and environmental exposure to pesticides and solvents that act as carriers for the pesticides and adverse reproductive outcomes and impaired neurologic function. Accomplishments: The worker's health study data collection is completed and this was an extremely difficult project to do. This is one of the few studies of farmworkers in the United States that has used epidemologic methods to gather the data and not used a convenience sample. It is also one of the few studies to look at chronic health effects of low level pesticide exposure and neurologic function. We have started to analyze the paraoxonase samples and the results look encouraging. PON1 polymorphisms have been completed and the contract laboratory is working on PON2. Dr. Douglas Bell is collaborating with us on these analyses. It took several years to clear the self-administered data collected by the Agricultural Health Study but now that is mostly done and the data look they may be interesting. We are first looking at general risk factors for menstrual cycle abnormalities among women age 20-40 who are not taking birth control pills or are not pregnant. We are looking at general medical risk factors first with the idea that we need to identify these before looking at whether pesticides might disrupt menstrual cycle function. We have seen strong relationships between body mass, depression, high blood pressure, diabetes, age, cigarettes, thyroid disease, and menstrual cycle abnormalities in our initial look at the data.