(Press-News.org) New York, NY — July 9, 2025 — A study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai shows that exposure to lead during pregnancy and early childhood may accelerate the rate at which children forget information—a critical marker of memory impairment that may have implications for learning and development.
Using delayed matching-to-sample task (DMTS)—a cognitive task that can be used to evaluate underlying neurobehavioral functions, such as attention and working memory, and has been demonstrated to be sensitive to metal neurotoxicants—the study examined how both prenatal and early childhood blood lead levels affect working memory in children ages 6 to 8. In this task, the children were presented a picture, and then had to select that same picture from three choices presented after a brief delay. The study was published in Science Advances on July 9, 2025.
Researchers applied an innovative statistical approach known as a nonlinear modified power function to model memory decay, uncovering a measurable link between higher childhood lead levels and faster forgetting rates.
The findings showed that higher lead exposure at ages 4–6 was significantly associated with a faster rate of forgetting—even at low median blood lead levels (~1.7 µg/dL). Additionally, older children and those whose mother’s IQ was higher were more likely to show better memory retention.
“The nonlinear modified power function has been validated in previous animal and human studies but is now applied in the field of environmental health,” said Katherine Svensson, PhD, MS, a postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and co-first author of the study. “This new usage is important because children are exposed to many environmental chemicals, and this model provides a validated method to further assess the effect of additional environmental exposures, such as heavy metals, air pollution, or endocrine disruptors, on children’s working memory.”
This study also validates a method for assessing neurobehavioral function, paving the way for translational research that can bridge human data with mechanistic insights from laboratory studies.
“Our work advances the current literature by incorporating operant tests—specifically the DMTS—which are commonly used in animal toxicology studies but sparse in human studies. This translational approach is a key innovation of our work,” said Jamil M. Lane, PhD, MPH, Instructor, Environmental Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-first author.
The implications are clear: even low-level lead exposure can undermine key cognitive functions in young children. As memory and attention are foundational for academic and social success, this research underscores the urgent need for continued investment in lead prevention efforts—especially in historically overburdened communities.
“There may be no more important a trait than the ability to form memories. Memories define who we are and how we learn,” said Robert Wright, MD, MPH, Ethel H. Wise Chair of the Department of Environmental Medicine and Co-Director of the Institute for Exposomic Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This paper breaks new ground by showing how environmental chemicals can interfere with the rate of memory formation. Children with higher levels of blood lead forgot the test stimulus faster than those with low blood lead levels.”
This study opens the door for future work to explore how environmental exposures like lead intersect with other cognitive domains such as attention, executive function, and reward processing. It also strengthens the case for policy interventions that protect children’s developing brains before irreversible harm occurs.
Research funding for this study was provided in part by NIH grants: T32HD049311, R01ES014930, R01ES013744, R24ES028522, P30ES023515, R01ES026033, R01MH122447, R01ES029511, R01ES028927, R03ES033374, and K25HD104918. Read the full study here. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adq4495
###
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with 48,000 employees working across seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, more than 600 research and clinical labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advances health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time—discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it.
Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients’ medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment. The Health System includes approximately 9,000 primary and specialty care physicians and 11 free-standing joint-venture centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida. Hospitals within the System are consistently ranked by Newsweek’s® “The World’s Best Smart Hospitals, Best in State Hospitals, World Best Hospitals and Best Specialty Hospitals” and by U.S. News & World Report's® “Best Hospitals” and “Best Children’s Hospitals.” The Mount Sinai Hospital is on the U.S. News & World Report® “Best Hospitals” Honor Roll for 2024-2025.
For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
END
Imagine a physician attempting to reach a cancerous nodule deep within a patient's lung – a target the size of a pea, hidden behind a maze of critical blood vessels and airways that shift with every breath. Straying one millimeter off course could puncture a major artery, and falling short could mean missing the cancer entirely, allowing it to spread untreated.
This is the high-stakes reality physicians face in thousands of procedures daily, where accuracy is critical and the task is complicated by anatomical obstacles that are non-penetrable or sensitive. Can artificial intelligence (AI) and robots help address these challenges and ...
Strengthening school students’ resilience to disinformation requires more than isolated interventions on source criticism. A new study from Uppsala University shows that short teaching interventions on disinformation have no long-term effect on upper secondary school students’ ability to distinguish between credible and misleading news.
The results are now published in the scholarly journal PLOS One and are based on a study of 459 Swedish upper secondary school students.
The study, supported by the Swedish Institute ...
Andy Jagoda, MD, Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine of Mount Sinai, has received the prestigious Edward W. Gilmore Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). He was presented with this honor Wednesday, July 9, at the New York ACEP Scientific Assembly in Bolton Landing, New York.
This award honors Dr. Jagoda for his significant contributions to the field through education, leadership, mentoring, and advancing the quality of emergency care. It recognizes Dr. Jagoda’s lifelong commitment to, and lasting impact on, the specialty of emergency medicine ...
The drugs, sutezolid and delpazolid, have demonstrated strong antimicrobial activity and a notably better safety profile compared to linezolid, with potential to replace this current cornerstone in the treatment of drug-resistant TB. The findings were published on July 8, 2025, in two peer-reviewed articles in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, one of the world’s leading journals in the field of infectious disease medicine. Research partners in Germany included the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), Munich, ...
For the first time, a fluorescent-guided nerve imaging agent shows promise for use in humans, according to a paper published in Nature Communications. The study sought to evaluate the safety of bevonescein, a synthetic peptide-dye conjugate thought to be applicable for intraoperative nerve-specific fluorescence imaging.
Eben Rosenthal, MD, chair of the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, served as the paper’s senior and corresponding author, and Sarah Rohde, MD, MMHC, division chief of Head and Neck Surgery, is ...
Koalas are a nationally endangered and iconic species in Australia, yet their populations are rapidly declining due to habitat loss, fragmentation, and disease, and very little is known about the fine-scale movements of koalas – especially when they’re on the ground. New research reveals that koalas only spend around 10 minutes per day on the ground, but this ground-time is associated with two-thirds of recorded koala deaths.
“Koalas are mostly tree-dwelling, but due to extensive land clearing, they’re increasingly forced to travel on the ground, which puts them at serious risk of injury and death,” ...
The future of sustained space habitation depends on our ability to grow fresh food away from Earth. The revolutionary new collaborative Moon-Rice project is using cutting-edge experimental biology to create an ideal future food crop that can be grown in future deep-space outposts, as well as in extreme environments back on Earth.
Modern space exploration relies heavily on resupplies of food from Earth, but this tends to be largely pre-prepared meals that rarely contain fresh ingredients. To counteract the negative effects that the space ...
A new study, published in Addiction, shines a light on how industries associated with health harms—such as tobacco, fossil fuels, and in this case, alcohol—can distort the evaluation of scientific research through industry-friendly commentary.
A team of researchers led by UVic’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research (CISUR), analyzed 268 critiques of alcohol and health studies published online since 2010 by the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research, or ISFAR.
ISFAR describes themselves as an international group of “invited physicians and scientists who are specialists in their fields and committed ...
Plastic waste pollutes oceans across all regions of the world. Marine animals may become entangled in larger plastic debris such as nets and bags or mistake smaller pieces for food. Ingested plastic can block or injure the gastrointestinal tract. The smallest plastic particles in the micro and nano range are mostly excreted, but a small proportion can pass through the intestinal wall and enter the bloodstream.
So how much nanoplastic is actually present in the oceans? Most scientific attention has so far been focussed ...
Wild relatives of cultivated plants are a vital source of genetic diversity for improving crops and provide a valuable reservoir of resistance against biotic and abiotic stressors. Although their value has been recognised for decades, technological obstacles have long hindered their exploration. Thanks to advances in high-throughput genomic research, the same tools can now be used in crops and their wild relatives.
An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute studied structural genome evolution in barley (Hordeum vulgare) and Hordeum bulbosum. For this study, Dr. Frank Blattner collected H. bulbosum ...
