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Doctors travelled halfway around the world to try to settle one of the hottest controversies in pediatrics: Do mercury levels in fish eaten by pregnant women affect their child’s development? The answer, at least so far, is no.
In fact, researchers contend the benefits of fish nutrients such as omega-3 fatty acids may outweigh any dangers from mercury.
Dr. Philip Davidson, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, and his colleagues studied 779 mother-infant pairs from the Indian Ocean island nation of the Seychelles, where people consume an average of 11 fish-containing meals per week.
“From all the reports we had seen about mercury and its impact on development, we thought we would be able to show how bad it was for children,” Davidson says. “But we didn’t find it at all.”
During the 15 years of the study, researchers tested mothers’ hair samples for mercury and compared children of mothers with high and low levels. They could find only minor differences among the more than 60 factors tested. Nine-year-old children of mothers with the highest mercury levels were less adept at performing a peg board test. But these children also did better than other children in language capabilities and in drawing and copying skills.
Davidson says toxic effects of mercury could still show up in these children, but he says, “I don’t think there is a problem with pregnant women eating fish. I think what we may be seeing is that the micronutrients in fish such as selenium may be exerting a protective effect against mercury.”
Susan Carlson, a professor of nutrition at the Kansas University Medical Center in Kansas City who was not involved in the study, says warnings about eating fish may have caused overreactions among women, “most of whom don’t eat enough fish as it is.”
Carlson notes other studies have linked increased fish consumption with improvements in intelligence quotient scores in kids in the U.S. and Scandinavia. “The Seychelles experiment results fit with all the data that indicate omega-3 fatty acids found in fish are associated with good outcomes.”