Black and Hispanic women who work as hairdressers are exposed to an array of chemicals, including many that have not been previously identified, a small study finds. Researchers found that compared with women of color in office jobs, hair stylists had higher levels of various chemicals in their urine. Those substances included expected ones — ingredients known to be in salon products — but also many more the researchers could not identify. Experts said the findings underscore a need to better understand the chemical exposures inherent to salon work — and what the health effects could be. There is particular concern for Black women and Hispanic women in the industry, according to senior researcher Carsten Prasse, an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Those women may have especially high exposure to chemical hair products like straighteners and dyes, because their clients often want those services. Hair products, as well as a range of personal care products, commonly contain chemicals that are considered endocrine disruptors — meaning they may interfere with the body’s hormones. Studies have linked some of those products, including hair straighteners and dyes, to increased risks of breast, ovarian and uterine cancers in women who use them frequently. Some of the chemicals in personal care products may be familiar to consumers, such as parabens, pthalates and…  read on >  read on >

There’s good news for American mothers-to-be and their newborns: Rates of smoking during pregnancy have fallen by 36% since 2016, a new report finds. The percentage of pregnant women who smoked was already low in 2016 compared to decades past: 7.2%. But by 2021, that rate had fallen to just 4.6%. That’s according to the latest data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Keeping tobacco toxins away from the developing fetus is crucial to infant health. According to the March of Dimes, smoking while pregnant has been linked to higher risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, premature delivery, ectopic pregnancy, birth defects and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), among other harms. The new data comes from a national database which is sourced, in part, by information provided by U.S. mothers around the time of their deliveries. Researchers led by the NCHS’ Joyce Martin reported that “the percentage of mothers who smoked during pregnancy declined across all maternal age groups between 2016 and 2021.” Declines were seen regardless of race or ethnicity and they occurred across the nation. Overall, Martin’s team calculated that rates of smoking during pregnancy fell by an average of 8% per year between 2016 and 2021. The pandemic year of 2020-2021 brought a particularly steep decline of 16%, they noted. Young mothers…  read on >  read on >

The “love hormone” oxytocin might not play the critical role in forming social bonds that scientists have long believed, a new animal study suggests. Prairie voles bred without receptors for oxytocin display the same monogamous mating, attachment and parenting behaviors as regular voles, according to researchers. “While oxytocin has been considered ‘Love Potion No. 9,’ it seems that potions 1 through 8 might be sufficient,” said co-senior researcher Dr. Devanand Manoli, a psychiatrist with the University of California, San Francisco’s Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “This study tells us that oxytocin is likely just one part of a much more complex genetic program.” Prairie voles are one of the few mammals known to form lifelong monogamous relationships, so they are a natural fit for researchers looking into the biology of social bonding. Studies performed in the 1990s showed that oxytocin-blocking drugs left voles unable to pair-bond, researchers said in background notes. As a result, oxytocin gained its reputation as a love hormone. To dig further into that relationship, researchers used gene-editing tools to create prairie voles that lacked functional oxytocin receptors. They then tested the altered voles’ ability to form enduring relationships with other voles. The researchers were surprised to find that the mutant voles paired up as readily as normal voles. “The patterns were indistinguishable,” Manoli said in a university news release. “The major behavioral…  read on >  read on >

If you find yourself stuck in a traffic jam and you start to feel fuzzy-headed, the diesel exhaust from the truck in front of you might be to blame. New research found that just two hours of exposure to diesel exhaust impaired the brain’s functional connectivity, which can lower your ability to think and remember. “We compared people after diesel exhaust exposure compared to filtered air exposure. We saw that network had decreased activity,” said lead researcher Jodie Gawryluk. She is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Fortunately, the effect doesn’t last long, usually clearing in a couple of hours, Gawryluk said, but it’s not known if long-term exposure to diesel exhaust can cause permanent brain damage. “That’s certainly a possibility,” she noted. “There’s studies ongoing right now looking at whether this could be a potential risk factor for neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.” In an earlier study, Aisha Dickerson, an assistant professor in the department of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, found that work exposure to diesel exhaust was linked to an increased risk for the neurodegenerative disease ALS (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease). It’s very possible that long-term exposure can cause permanent brain damage, Dickerson said. “I would expect to see…  read on >  read on >

Infants exposed to maternal smoking during pregnancy are more than five times more likely to die unexpectedly compared to babies of nonsmokers, a new study says. “The message is simple. Smoking greatly elevates the risk of sudden unexpected infant death,” said lead study author Barbara Ostfeld, program director of the SIDS Center of New Jersey and a professor of pediatrics at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J. “Everyone who plans to get pregnant has a profoundly important reason to quit,” Ostfeld said in a school news release. Each year, about 3,400 sudden unexpected infant deaths (SUID) occur in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These deaths occur in an infant’s first year. They include those attributed to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), those with no immediately obvious cause, as well as those caused by accidental suffocation. The Rutgers analysis studied SUID in infants born in the United States, including 3.3 million births to white women and more than 857,000 births to Black women. Researchers used birth and death records maintained by the CDC for 2012 to 2013 for infants born between 24 and 42 weeks gestation. And they included SUID cases in which the infant died after hospital discharge and an autopsy was performed. While a smaller percentage of Black than white mothers reported smoking,…  read on >  read on >