Monday, August 05, 2013

Another Week, Another Attack on BPA

Last week, the big BPAphobic issue was the announcement that BPA harms the fertility of human eggs. As usual, the hyped-up PR blurb from the researchers organization got all the press and was repeated ad infinitum while the actual research article was unread even though the article was open access. And that goes for the summary too.

For if anyone had just read the summary, they would have found this section:
"LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION Although we used sibling oocytes to overcome potential confounders, such as infertility diagnosis and maternal age, additional studies with a larger number of oocytes are required to confirm the present results. Having access only to clinically discarded oocytes, we were limited to evaluating only those oocytes that failed to mature in vivo despite having been exposed to gonadotrophin stimulation and the ovulatory trigger of HCG."
In otherwords, they had a batch of bad, or at least dubious eggs to start with.

Reading the article would surely produce more questions about the conclusions, such as whether or not the BPA doses were reasonable or not, etc. but somehow these limitations that the authors themselves point out were overlooked, despite them being readily available on the summary page.

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