Early life multiple exposures and child cognitive function: a multi-centric birth cohort study in six European countries

Abstract

Epidemiological studies mostly focus on single environmental exposures. This study aims to systematically assess associations between a wide range of prenatal and childhood environmental exposures and cognition. The study sample included data of 1298 mother-child pairs, children were 6–11 years-old, from six European birth cohorts. We measured 87 exposures during pregnancy and 122 cross-sectionally during childhood, including air pollu-tion, built environment, meteorology, natural spaces, traffic, noise, chemicals and life styles. The measured cognitive domains were fluid intelligence (Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices test, CPM), attention (Atten-tion Network Test, ANT) and working memory (N-Back task). We used two statistical approaches to assess as-sociations between exposure and child cognition: the exposome-wide association study (ExWAS) considering each exposure independently, and the deletion-substitution-addition algorithm (DSA) considering all exposures simultaneously to build a final multiexposure model. Based on this multiexposure model that included the exposure variables selected by ExWAS and DSA models, child organic food intake was associated with higher fluid intelligence (CPM) scores (beta =1.18; 95% CI =0.50, 1.87) and higher working memory (N-Back) scores (0.23; 0.05, 0.41), and child fast food intake [...]