July 10, 2015
MEDICAL UNIVERSITY of SOUTH CAROLINA
Oil spill study raises ‘red flag’ about compound By Dawn Brazell
Inside Humanitas
Public Relations
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T
hat good could come from a devastating oil spill may seem odd. “We learn from our mistakes, but we’re learning more than we even expected to,” said Demetri Spyropoulos, Ph.D., a researcher and senior author of a study released July 2 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, which is published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The study had two “home runs,” he said. One was that researchers found a commonly-used chemical known as DOSS (dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate), an ingredient in the dispersant used to clean up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, is likely an obesogen. An obesogen is a compound that potentially contributes to obesity in people and wildlife. The second major finding was how commonly used this compound is, including in laxatives, some flavored soft and fruit drinks, homogenized milk and many personal care products. “We were expecting this to be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we
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Dr. Demetri Spyropooulos points to a vial of COREXIT, a dispersant used in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. His team studied this, oil mixed with dispersant and saline (middle) and Deepwater Horizon crude ‘source’ oil. were able to zero in on a single component in this complex mix of oil and dispersant,” said Spyropoulos, who is an associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI), scientists were investigating the environmental contamination resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The spill began April 20, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico and was capped 87 days later. An estimated 200 million gallons of oil impacted about 500 miles of the Gulf’s shoreline and about two million gallons of dispersant were used in the cleanup. A major component of the COREXIT dispersants used to clean up the spill is DOSS. The oil, saline and dispersant mixture is a complicated brew of compounds that scientists were examining to see if any parts of the mixture had biologically active agents that act as endocrine disruptors. The disruptors belong to a class of chemicals that change the body’s hormone systems by mimicking or blocking normal processes. The study showed DOSS binds to a protein that changes the expression of a suite of genes involved in making new fat cells and
other related functions. “One possible effect of that orchestration is to drive stem cells toward fat cells," Spyropoulos said. “With the obesity epidemic, not only is it about what you eat and how hard you exercise, but that there are chemicals in the environment that might tell your body to behave differently than it normally would, such as make more fat cells or change your metabolism to increase your appetite or slow your metabolism.” A GRAS (generally recognized as safe) notice on DOSS was submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in 1998, which means manufacturers of food and personal care products can put it into products and not mention that it is in there. Since it’s used in laxatives such as Colace that are prescribed to some pregnant women, and might be in so many commonly–used products, it’s important for researchers to look at its possible impacts on human health, he said. “We’re at a point where we have put up a red flag, and we can say on a cellular level this likely contributes to fat cell differentiation. We don’t know yet if this compound DOSS will be obesogenic in
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