Reproductive health outcomes and pesticide exposure

This review provides evidence that non-organochlorine pesticides may cause deleterious reproductive outcomes. The most suggestive evidence is of an association between fetal growth outcomes and pesticide exposure. Of the ten studies that considered fetal growth outcomes, eight reported significant associations. Most of these positive associations were for birth weight, and were from well-designed cohort studies. As low-birth-weight babies are at increased risk of mortality, morbidity, and disability in infancy and childhood and of long-term adverse health outcomes in adult life, reducing low-birth-weight rates should be a public health priority. However, the associations found for a given type of pesticide in one study were not always replicated in other studies of that pesticide. These inconsistencies, which could be due to differences in sample size, methodology, and study design, make it challenging to draw definitive conclusions. While it appears that there is an association between pesticide exposure and birth weight, this relationship varies according to the type of pesticide, with some giving rise to less than consistent findings.