PHI’s CHDS Produces Special Issue of “Reproductive Toxicology” on Pregnancy Exposure and Breast Cancer

PHI’s Child Health and Development Studies (CHDS) researchers and collaborators have produced a special issue of the journal, Reproductive Toxicology, co-edited by Barbara Cohn, CHDS Director, and Mary Beth Terry, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.

This special issue, released in the spring of 2020, is comprised of 13 articles and two distinguished commentaries on the relation of exposures in pregnancy to the risk of breast cancer in mothers and their daughters. These two-generation CHDS studies are unique, cover incident breast cancer in relation to legacy and current environmental chemicals (including PFASs), widespread current contaminants, epigenomic consequences, the role of the placenta, and impact of environmental chemicals on breast density and related experimental toxicology and metabolome-wide association studies.

This special issue includes a commentary titled CHDS: A National Treasure that Keeps on Giving, by Suzanne Fenton, Group Leader, Reproductive Endocrinology, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and Linda Birnbaum, Director Emeritus, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and a forward by Marion Kavanaugh Lynch, Director of the California Breast Cancer Research Program.

This body of research firmly establishes the importance of ancestral environmental exposures in the occurrence of breast cancer and provides a new look at prevention opportunities based on biomarkers of exposure and public policy to protect mothers during pregnancy and thus their daughters before birth.