DES prenatal exposure specific risk factors may interfere with penile development
“We also included a question included about being a ‘DES-daughter’ or ‘DES-son’, and parents who suspected or were certain about prenatal DES exposure were asked to clarify this.”
“… there appeared to be a slightly elevated risk of hypospadias when the mother thought or was certain that she was a DES daughter, .., “
2010 Study Abstract
OBJECTIVES
To obtain more insight into the origin of hypospadias by exploring a wide range of potential risk factors in a case-referent study in which a distinction was made between different phenotypes.
PATIENTS AND METHODS
Cases and referents were 305 boys with hypospadias and 629 boys with middle ear effusion whose parents completed postal questionnaires. Hypospadias phenotype was classified as distal (195 boys), middle (67), and proximal (43). Adjusted odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated using logistic regression.
RESULTS
Low birth weight, being a twin or triplet, mother being a diethylstilbestrol-daughter, fertility treatments, paternal subfertility, obesity, prescriptive drug use, and familial occurrence of hypospadias or testicular cancer were associated with hypospadias in general. For familial occurrence of hypospadias, there were high risk estimates for the distal and middle phenotypes with an OR (95%CI) of 10.4 (4.5-24.1) and 9.0 (3.1-26.0), but not for the proximal type at 1.8 (0.2-14.9). By contrast, the association with low birth weight (a proxy for placental dysfunction) seemed much stronger for proximal hypospadias with an OR (95%CI) of 9.1 (3.4-24.2) compared with distal and middle hypospadias at 2.6 (1.4-5.0) and 2.3 (0.8-6.5). There were similar estimates for pre-eclampsia.
CONCLUSIONS
These findings indicate aetiological heterogeneity of hypospadias and provide indications for the possible mechanisms through which specific risk factors may interfere with penile development.
Sources
- Hypospadias: risk factor patterns and different phenotypes, NCBI PubMed PMID: 19751252, 2010 Jan.
- Featured image credit Jonathan Petersson.
DES DIETHYLSTILBESTROL RESOURCES
- Source DES and hypospadias studies.
- Diethylstilbestrol DES studies by topics.