Dr Sung Kyun Park
Women in midlife exposed to combinations of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), dubbed "forever and everywhere chemicals", are at increased risk of developing diabetes, similar to the magnitude of risk associated with overweight, and even greater than the risk associated with smoking, new research shows.
"This is the first study to examine the joint effect of PFAS on incident diabetes," first author Sung Kyun Park, ScD, MPH, told Medscape Medical News.
"We showed that multiple PFAS as mixtures have larger effects than individual PFAS," said Park, of the Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The results suggest that, "given that 1.5 million Americans are newly diagnosed with diabetes each year in the USA, approximately 370,000 new cases of diabetes annually in the US are attributable to PFAS exposure," Park and authors note in the study, published this week in Diabetologia.
However, Kevin McConway, PhD, emeritus professor of applied statistics, The Open University, UK, told the UK Science Media Centre: "[Some] doubt about cause still remains. Yes, this study does show that PFAS may increase diabetes risk in middle-aged women, but it certainly can't rule out other explanations for its findings."
Is There Any Way to Reduce Exposure?
PFASs, known to be ubiquitous in the environment and also often dubbed "endocrine-disrupting" chemicals, have structures similar to fatty acids.
