Women in midlife who have a moderate
to high degree of exposure to organic solvents at work are more than twice
as likely to be forgetful as women who have no such exposure, a study
of nearly 1,000 Northern California women has revealed. The finding casts
a new light on the popular assumption that women going through menopause
become forgetful due to hormonal changes.
This is the first multi-ethnic study, of
approximately half Chinese and half Caucasian women, to look at the relationship
between solvent exposure and symptom reporting during this time of women’s
lives. Conducted by Research Scientist Shelley Green of the Air Pollution
Unit, Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, California EPA,
COEH faculty member
Ellen Gold of UC Davis, and colleagues, the study
examined the relationship of exposure to organic solvents (for example,
those in paint thinners and dry cleaning solution) to hot flashes, night
sweats, forgetfulness, and other symptoms in women aged 40–55 years.
The women worked in a wide range of occupations, from jobs like bookkeeping,
where women are not likely to be exposed to solvents, to jobs like hairdressing
or cosmetology, where exposure is high. No occupational exposures were
related to hot flashes or night sweats.
The researchers did not do work-site exposure assessments but rather used
a job-exposure matrix developed at the National Cancer Institute, which
combined data from published and unpublished reports with the assessment
of the project’s industrial hygienists. The occupational exposure
study was conducted in the course of screening women in Northern California
for participation in the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation
(SWAN), funded by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute
of Nursing Research, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative
Medicine, and the Office of Research on Women’s Health of the National
Institutes of Health.
Besides reporting more forgetfulness, women with high intensity exposure
to harmful chemical compounds were more likely to characterize their health
as fair or poor than women with no exposure. The two findings—memory
problems and perception of poorer health—are particularly significant
in light of the fact that the study was controlled to account for potentially
confounding factors such as ethnicity, smoking, and problems related to
socio-economic status.
“Physicians shouldn’t assume that patients are becoming
forgetful due to aging or menopause,” said Green. “It might
be due to an exposure at work that perhaps they can do something about.”
If the larger SWAN study results confirm these results in the longitudinal
phase, further research on particular cohorts of solvent-exposed women
in midlife may be warranted.
