Impact of prenatal triclosan exposure on gestational age and anthropometric measures at birth: A systematic review and meta‑analysis

Background: Exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals such as triclosan (TCS) leads to disrupting the endocrine system and consequently effect on the birth outcomes. The findings of studies in this field are controversial. Materials and Methods: This systematic review and meta analysis was conducted based on the identified published papers in Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed up to November 2019. All steps, including searching, screening, data extracting, and quality assessment, were done by two independent researchers. Results: Finally 15 published papers selected. The number of participants in whom the association of TCS exposure was assessed with birth weight, birth length, birth head circumference, and gestational age were 9112, 4311, 2854, and 3181 mother infant pairs, respectively. The pooled analysis showed that TCS exposure during pregnancy leads to increasing the birth weight for boys with β= 3.97 and 95% confidence interval (CI) (−3.98, 11.92), and girls with β= 5.37, 95% CI (−6.00, 16.75), but the association was not statistically significant. In addition, according to fixed effects models, the TCS exposure was not significantly associated with birth length (−0.008, 95% CI [−0.049, 0.034]), birth head circumference (−0.01, 95% CI [−0.08, 0.06]), and gestational age (−0.005, 95% CI [−0.017, 0.006]). Likewise, analysis for data segregated by gender of infants revealed similar results. Conclusion: The obtained results depicted that the TCS exposure during pregnancy period was associated with higher birth weight for boys and girls. No significant association was observed for TCS exposure with variation of birth length, head circumference, and gestational age duration. In fact, the results showed the evidence of null associations between maternal TCS exposure and birth outcomes.