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Poster #76 - Associations Between Prenatal Pesticide Exposure and Infant Anger/Frustration at 12 months Among Thai Infants

Fri, March 24, 1:30 to 2:15pm, Salt Palace Convention Center, Floor: 1, Hall A-B

Abstract

Background: Organophosphates (OPs) are widely used insecticides in Thailand (Panuwet et al., 2012). Cohort studies have documented the effects of insecticide exposures on behavioral/emotional problems in older children and adolescents (e.g. internalizing and externalizing problems) (Hyland et al., 2021; Thistle et al., 2022). However, studies evaluating the impact of insecticides exposure on behavioral/emotional problems in infancy are lacking. Therefore, this study examined the effects of prenatal exposure to OPs measured during pregnancy on direct observation of anger/frustration in response to an inaccessible attractive toy among infants at 1 year of age.
Methods: Pregnant Thai women from Chiang Mai province, actively working in agriculture, were enrolled in our birth cohort study (SAWASDEE study; Baumert et al., 2022). We collected multiple urine samples during pregnancy, composited them by trimester, and analyzed composited samples for six dialkylphosphate (DAP) metabolites of OP insecticides. A total of 285 healthy infants completed an attractive toy placed behind a barrier episode of the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery adapted for use in Thailand (Lab-TAB; Goldsmith & Rothbart, 1996) at 1 year of age. In this episode, the infant was allowed to play with a toy freely for 15s, then the toy was taken away and placed behind a clear plastic barrier for 30s repeatedly for 3 trials. Infants’ anger/frustration reactivity were coded from video records. We performed principal component analysis to create infant anger/frustration composite scores, resulting in 3 factors of anger/frustration reactivity (i.e., facial-vocal anger, struggling approach behavior, and struggling withdrawal behavior). We explored potential covariates with backwards stepwise regression (e.g., maternal demographics, psychological factors, family income, infant birth data) and identified maternal and paternal education as significant covariates in our regression models. We used standard linear regression to determine the association between maternal urinary summed DAP concentrations and infant anger/frustration followed by regression analysis stratified by infant sex.
Results: We found a statistically significant inverse association between prenatal ΣDAP and facial-vocal anger/frustration reactivity (β = -.142, p = .037) after controlling for maternal and paternal education and creatinine. When stratified by infant sex, we observed a statistically significant inverse association between prenatal ΣDAP and facial-vocal anger/frustration reactivity for boys (β = -.259, p = .006), but not for girls.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that increasing prenatal exposure to OPs predicted less infant anger/frustration when the infant was confronted with a frustrating task. These findings may imply increased ability to manage frustration with greater insecticide exposure during prenatal development. Alternatively, atypically low anger/frustration reactivity toward goal-blocking situation may be disadvantageous to goal-directed persistence, especially at 1 year of age and may result in later behavioral problems as well (Brooker et al., 2014). Earlier findings from this study showed that lower arousal and excitability at 5 weeks was associated with greater OP exposure (Sittiwang et al., submitted). Further investigation of very low anger/frustration reactivity among young OP exposed infants and later developmental outcomes will help clarify the findings. Subsequent analyses of these data will take into account infants’ earlier developmental status to help clarify the current results.

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