Can Pollution Modify And Predict The Sex Of Your Baby?
Factors that had the most significant impact on gender, such as mercury and proximity to industrial facilities, have shifted the proportion by up to 3%.
Exposure to pollution might have affected the proportion of millions of boys and girls born in the US and Sweden, according to new research.
The study found that pollution from mercury, chromium, and aluminum is associated with the birth of more male babies, while lead pollution increases the number of female babies.
A team from the University of Chicago and the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm studied half the US population (150 million) and the entire Swedish population (9 million), discovering more than 100 possible factors that are also linked. In addition to pollution, these included parental stress levels, poverty, crime, and unemployment. Even area temperatures.
How close the families lived on the farms played also an important role, probably due to the greater exposure to chemicals. The study, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, looked at the North American population for more than eight years and the Swedes for more than 30 years. So the data is extremely detailed.
So how can pollution affect a baby’s sex?
The human sex ratio at birth (SRB) of babies is determined during conception when exactly half the fetuses should be girls and half boys. However, scientists know that hormonal factors can have a greater impact on fetuses of either sex under different conditions during pregnancy; which means that the proportions are naturally distorted.
This new research shows that both air and water pollutants affect the ratio. The keyword here is “influence”; scientists have found an association, rather than a cause and an effect.
Impact air pollutants included iron, lead, mercury, carbon monoxide, aluminum, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Water pollutants included chromium and arsenic.
“There are a lot of myths about gender ratio and births, but when you go deeper into the research, it turns out that everything that was looked at was done in relatively small samples, and some statements are not based on observations at all,” Andrey Rzhetsky (lead researcher at the University of Chicago) supported in an interview on the Guardian.
This is the first systematic investigation of many chemical pollutants and other environmental factors using large data sets from two continents. Factors that had the most significant impact on a baby’s sex, such as mercury pollution and proximity to industrial facilities, saw the proportion shifting by up to 3%. So, in a population of 1 million, that would mean 60,000 more girls than boys.
As much as scientists want to believe that they know everything about the human body, they are just deluding themselves. The mysteries that are hidden behind the perfectly structured mechanism of the human body’s operation, are extremely interesting for further research.
