Urinary Glycol Ether Metabolites in Women and Time to Pregnancy: The PELAGIE Cohort

Background: Glycol ethers are present in a wide range of occupational and domestic products. Animal studies have suggested that some of them may affect ovarian function. oBjective: We examined the relation between women’s exposure to glycol ethers and time to pregnancy. Methods: We used chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry to measure eight glycol ether metabolites in urine samples from randomly selected women in the PELAGIE mother–child cohort who had samples collected before 19 weeks of gestation. Using time to pregnancy information collected at the beginning of the pregnancy (women were asked how many months it took for them to conceive), we estimated associations between metabolite levels and time to pregnancy in 519 women with complete data using discrete-time Cox proportional hazards models to adjust for potential confounders. results: We detected glycol ether metabolites in 6 % (for ethoxyacetic acid) to 93 % (for phenoxy-acetic and butoxyacetic acids) of urine samples. Phenoxyacetic acid was the only metabolite with a statistically significant association with longer time to pregnancy [fecundability OR = 0.82; 95 % CI: 0.63, 1.06 for the second and third quartile combined; fecundability OR = 0.70; 95 % CI