TOXIC FALLOUT SLASHED INFANTS' BIRTH WEIGHT
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
August 6, 2003 -- Pregnant women who were exposed to the toxic plume from the World Trade Center collapse were twice as likely to have much smaller babies than other new moms, researchers said yesterday. A study of 182 women who were near the towers when they came down showed that 15 of them gave birth to infants who registered in the lowest 10 percent for birth weight, said Trudy Berkowitz, a professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Although they may have been just ounces lighter than similar babies born to moms who weren't near the towers on 9/11, "their birth weight was smaller than you would have expected, given the length of the pregnancy," Berkowitz said. The study appears tomorrow in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Mt. Sinai research found that 8.2 percent of the WTC babies had the smaller than expected birth weight, compared to 3.8 percent for a control group of infants born to women who were not exposed directly to the trade center dust, ash and smoke. "It was a doubling in the proportion and that was statistically significant," Berkowitz said. "The babies look like they're pretty healthy and what were talking about are fairly subtle effects so it's not like extremely small babies," Berkowitz said.
"We're going to monitor their growth and development. They come from homes with good nurturing and very highly educated parents and we don't expect to see neurological deficits." The 15 infants that emerged as the focus of the study - ranging from 3.1 to 6.1 pounds - all registered within the lowest ten percent for birth weight for babies of the same gestational age, even though that could be just ounces less than similar newborns. The lower birth weights could be due to a condition known as intrauterine growth restriction, or IUGR, a slowed or stunted fetal growth which has been linked in other studies with chronic exposure to air pollution, Berkowitz said. IUGR may have repercussions later in life, with some studies suggesting a higher risk of heart disease, hypertension and other health problems in adulthood. Berkowitz said stress did not appear to be a factor in causing the lower birth weights. The study found the WTC moms were not more likely to have premature births or babies with abnormally low birth weights. Taking into account all babies born to the WTC moms, the infants averaged just over 2 ounces less than those in the control group. Only two WTC babies were born with what is considered a "very low birth weight" of less than 3.3 pounds, and just one of those was in the group of 15 - the other, although low in weight, apparently came in above the bottom ten percent for a baby born at the same point of development.