ArticleEnvironment international2026
Prenatal and early life phthalate exposure and early life stress: no interactions with adolescent internalizing symptoms.
Article in Environment international, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Prenatal and early life exposure to phthalates has been increasingly implicated in adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. However, associations between phthalate exposure in early life and later adolescent mental health remain understudied, particularly when also considering co-exposure to early life psychosocial stressors. We examined the independent and combined associations of prenatal and early life (ages three, five, and seven) phthalate exposure with adolescent internalizing symptoms in a longitudinal cohort of 563 Black and Latiné mother-child dyads living in a low-income urban neighborhood. We further explored whether early life stress modified these associations or predicted internalizing symptoms independently. Exposure to eleven common phthalates was assessed using urinary metabolites measured in the third trimester of pregnancy and in children ages three, five, and seven. Early life stress was operationalized by a composite measure of material hardship and maternal demoralization measured concurrently with phthalate exposure. Youth self-reported anxiety and depression symptoms were measured between ages 13-15 with the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale and Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Inventory, respectively. Bayesian kernel machine regression assessed effects of the phthalate mixture on anxiety and depression symptoms. False discovery rate-corrected, pooled linear regressions tested individual phthalate effects, stratified by sex, and tested early life stress as an effect modifier. We did not detect significant associations between prenatal or postnatal phthalate exposure-either independently or jointly-and adolescent depression or anxiety; early life stress did not modify these associations or independently predict symptomology. However, uncertainty in effect estimates necessitates future research to clarify if these null effects hold in larger samples. If replicated, our findings suggest that there may be important, as yet unknown resilience factors protecting youth from long term effects of early phthalate exposure.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.