DEHP exposure linked to 1.69-fold higher odds of obesity in 1,252 Chinese children, cross-sectional study

Exposure to di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP) was associated with modestly higher odds of obesity in Chinese children, according to a cross-sectional study in the European journal of medical research. The authors analyzed data from 1252 children aged 9–11 years enrolled in the Childhood Obesity and New Environmental Factors (CONEF) cohort. The prevalence of obesity was 13.3%, and DEHP exposure was near universal biomedcentral.comEuropean journal of medical researchbiomedcentral.comOpen source ↗.

Exposure and obesity

The team measured three urinary DEHP metabolites, MEHP, MEHHP and MEOHP, by HPLC–MS/MS. After full adjustment, children in the highest quartile (Q4) of DEHP exposure had higher odds of obesity than those in the lowest quartile (Q1): OR 1.69, 95% CI 1.03–2.78. Associations were assessed with logistic regression.

The study is observational and cross-sectional, so it reports an association between exposure and obesity status, not a cause.

Gut microbiota

Gut microbial communities were profiled by 16S rRNA gene sequencing in a subpopulation of 288 children. Levels of lnMEOHP, lnMEHHP and lnΣDEHP were positively associated with the Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio at p < 0.05, but this was before Benjamini–Hochberg correction for multiple testing biomedcentral.comEuropean journal of medical researchbiomedcentral.comOpen source ↗.

Higher α-diversity was associated with lower odds of obesity (p < 0.05). In the joint analysis, the reference group was low DEHP exposure with a high diversity index. Compared with it, the high-exposure, low-index group had approximately threefold higher odds of obesity for observed species (OR 3.04; 95% CI 1.07–8.62), ACE (OR 3.03; 95% CI 1.08–8.52) and Chao1 (OR 2.84; 95% CI 1.00–8.07).

Multiplicative interaction between DEHP exposure and diversity was not significant for any index (p for interaction > 0.05). The authors concluded that DEHP exposure was associated with modestly increased odds of obesity but not with any index of gut microbial diversity. They also reported that the inverse association between microbial richness and obesity was independent of exposure.

The work was carried out by Rong Lian, Manman Chen, Yuankai Zhao, Xijie Wang, Zhenghe Wang and colleagues biomedcentral.comEuropean journal of medical researchbiomedcentral.comOpen source ↗.