Study on the Association among Mycotoxins and other Variables in Children with Autism

Abstract

Environmental factors and genetic susceptibility are implicated in the increased risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Mycotoxins are agricultural contaminants of fungal origin that represent real risk factors for human health and especially for children. Thus, the main hypothesis of this work is that the deterioration of the clinical manifestation of autism in children may result from the exposure to mycotoxins through the consumption of contaminated food. Within a cross-sectional study, a group of autistic children (n = 172) and a group of controls (n = 61) (siblings and non-parental) were recruited in North and South Italy. All children had blood and urine samples taken, for testing some mycotoxins by a LC–MS/MS validated method. Blood samples were also tested for assessing specific IgG against food and fungal antigens and cytokines. The analyses outputs highlighted statistically significant differences comparing mycotoxins levels between (i) children groups both in urine (deoxynivalenol and de-epoxydeoxynivalenol, p = 0.0141 and p = 0.0259, respectively) and serum (aflatoxin M1, ochratoxin A and fumonisin B1, p = 0.0072, p = 0.0141 and p = 0.0061, respectively); (ii) a group of selected fungal IgGs, and IgGs against wheat and gluten and (iii) cytokines. These results suggest the need for a deeper examination of the role that mycotoxins may have on the etiology of ASD.

Mycotoxin Biomarkers of Exposure: A Comprehensive Review

“…Human urinary analysis focused on free FB with FB1 as the most prevalent next to FB2 and FB3 (Cirlini et al., ; De Santis, et al., ; Gerding et al., ; Gong, Shirima, Srey, Kimanya, & Routledge, ; Solfrizzo, Gambacorta, & Visconti, ; Torres et al., ). However the mean FB1 levels found in urine have been low, for instance 0.07 ng/mL (Cirlini et al., ), 0.4 ng/mL (De Santis, et al., ), 0.44 ng/mL (Gerding et al., ), 1.38 ng/mL (Gong, et al., ), and 0.05 ng/mL (Solfrizzo et al., ). Moreover, a statistically significant correlation between the estimated FB intake and the urinary FB1 levels based on the Pearson product correlation was observed ( r = 0.26, p = 2.13 × 10 −17 , n = 1229) (Torres et al., ).…”

Liquid chromatography – high resolution mass spectrometry method for monitoring of 17 mycotoxins in human plasma for exposure studies

“…To address these limitations, Devreese et al [29] developed simple acetonitrile solvent precipitation method in combination with LC-MS for measurement of 13 mycotoxins in pig plasma suitable for toxicological studies, but the limits of quantitation (2-10 ng/mL) [29] do not make this method adaptable to human biomonitoring. Similarly, De Santis et al [30] combined pronase treatment, acidified ethyl acetate LLE and QuEChERS with LC-MS detection for the analysis of 8 mycotoxins, but the method showed insufficient limit of quantifications (LOQs) for accurate quantitation (mean values for positive samples below LOQ) and significant susceptibility to matrix effects for several of the analytes despite extensive clean-up. Tolosa et al [31] developed dispersive liquidliquid microextraction method using ethyl acetate in combination with LC-MS/MS for…”

“…Devreese et al [28] used 0.1% AA and 0.01% AA for their multi-mycotoxin and zearalenone class-specific methods, respectively and state that these modifiers provided the best sensitivity [27], but the extent of improvement was not reported. Osteresch et al [30] proposed the use of AA gradient and showed it provided better separation and S/N ratios than FA, but different gradients were tested for the two modifiers precluding direct side-by-side comparison. However, the potential of AA to increase signal intensity in ESI(-) was previously shown for other types of compounds.…”

Development of a Sensitive and Reliable UHPLC-MS/MS Method for the Determination of Multiple Urinary Biomarkers of Mycotoxin Exposure

“…Among the published methods for mycotoxin determination in biological samples, including HPLC [20,31,32], GC-MS/MS [33], LC-MS [34,35], LC-MS/MS [4,18,36,37], and LC-HRMS [38], LC-MS/MS provides remarkable selectivity, accuracy and sensitivity. Most of the methods were applied to detect common regulated mycotoxins [4,5,8,19,32,37,[39][40][41][42], employing various sample preparation strategies such as the "dilute and shoot" approach [4,5,37,41], QuEChERS [15], liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) [20], immunoaffinity (IAC) columns [41,42], solid phase extraction (SPE) [18], and various combinations of these techniques [13].…”