Another one of the messages out of this revolution in science that we’re seeing is that early exposures can affect events later in life.  Those early exposures can take place at multiple places along the developmental pathway.  A lot of it happens in the womb, some of it can happen right around birth.  There are other things that happen around puberty. 

One of the interesting aspects of this science that’s come out over the last 20 years is you have both immediate affects and you have long term affects.  Take the affect of Bisphenol A on prostate development.  We know that it not only changes the size of the prostate, but it increases the numbers of what are called androgyne receptors in the prostate.  Now hormones don’t work by themselves.  The classic way for a hormone to work is you have a hormone going through the blood, getting into the cell, and then the cell it enters into the nucleus.  And in the nucleus it combines with what’s called a receptor.  So you get the hormone and its receptor and together those two go bind to DNA and they stimulate the DNA to produce something.  Well you can alter how the system’s responding by putting more hormone in.  You can also alter it by having more receptors there to receive the hormone.  And what this prostate study shows is that early exposures to very low levels can alter the sensitivity of the system throughout life by changing the receptor density, the number of receptors that are there to receive that signal and then cause the change in DNA expression.  So what we’re seeing is this potential for immediate affects by changing genes of the time, changing structure of the time, but also we’re seeing that life long patterns of altered sensitivity can be set in place by very early exposures.

Another one of the messages out of this revolution in science that we’re seeing is that early exposures can affect events later in life.  Those early exposures can take place at multiple places along the developmental pathway.  A lot of it happens in the womb, some of it can happen right around birth.  There are other things that happen around puberty.  There are key transitional stages in life where sensitivity appears to be enhanced.  Those are the times when, it appears, they’re not exclusively those times, but those are the times when we worry most about the interference of these signaling disruptors with biological processes.