The study, published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, involved 8,977 cases of birth defects and 3,833 healthy controls from the National Birth Defects Prevention Study.
On analyzing mothers of around 9,000 children with birth defects, the researchers observed that certain abnormal birth conditions were more likely to be found in children of janitors, pharmacists or biological and chemical scientists.
"Given those job titles, one would expect those women to work with different chemicals or something that could possibly be an exposure," said lead author Michele Herdt-Losavio from the New York State Department of Health.
Mother’s profession risking babies’ health
Depending on the profession of the mother, the baby could be born with any of the physical defects, which are not related to the DNA, found Dr. Herdt-Losavio and her colleagues after studying 45 specific birth defects among mothers with 24 different occupations.
Women working as janitors were found to be more likely to give birth to a child with one or more of the defects including ear and eye defects, musculoskeletal problems, gastrointestinal problems, oral clefts and various other defects.
However, not all women working as janitors face similar risks, as Dr. Herdt-Losavio said, "There's lots of questions that can be asked.... What do you do as a janitor? What products do you use? What hours do you work? How many hours do you work?"
Chemicals might be the cause
The researchers, however, did not probe the probable reasons for this association between the birth defect of a child and his mother’s profession but they did offer a possible reasoning.
"What we can guess by looking at these job titles is that ... it's possible that they work with chemicals," said Dr. Herdt-Losavio. "It's not possible to say what those chemicals might be, or how much they might work with. But what we can do is point other [researchers] in the direction and give them some idea of where they might want to dig further and collect more data."
As of now, the researchers are trying to meticulously explore the association of scientist mothers with physical defects in their new born babies.
They will separately analyze the data for chemical scientists, engineers, biological scientists, pharmacists and geologists to determine which group had the highest risk of having babies with birth defects.
Dr. Herdt-Losavio stated that more research is required in this direction to dig up the exact causes of birth defects in children.
"Our hope with this study was to do a broad spectrum of these defects, which in most cases we tried to be very specific with and take into account a large number of occupations, so that other researchers can have an idea where future studies should be looking," she said.
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