About Diethylstilbestrol (DES)

DES was first synthesized in 1938 by the British scientist Edward Charles Dodds. It took the medical world by storm, when it was announced that a synthetic oestrogen chemical had been created.
With no proper research into the possible effects of DES in the human body, the chemical was prescribed to pregnant women in the misguided belief that it helped prevent miscarriages and premature births.
It was so widely used that for a time it was given to women with untroubled pregnancies as an added supplement. In the end it was used for more than 20 years and was prescribed to more than five million pregnant women.

 

DES and cancer

But in the late 1960’s at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston a number of extremely rare cancers began to show up. Seven cases of clear cell cancer of the vagina were diagnosed in the hospital between 1966 and 1969.
Before this sudden influx, there had only previously been four instances of this cancer ever reported in women under thirty in all the world’s medical literature.
Due to a strange coincidence Dr. Howard Ulfelder of the Harvard Medical School discovered that the young women who were suffering from these rare cases of cancer had mothers who had taken DES during the first few months of their pregnancies. He published his finding in the April 1971 New England Journal of Medicine.

 

But DES caused other reproductive complications

It was soon discovered that DES not only caused clear-cell cancers but it also caused deformities of the female reproductive tract. These structural abnormalities made DES daughters more susceptible to pregnancy problems such as miscarriages, premature babies and ectopic pregnancies.

 

Lessons of DES

Like the lessons of DDT in Silent Spring, the DES cases demonstrated how chemicals can have latent deleterious effects on a developing baby. Effects that may not be evident until decades later.
For centuries medicine has been aware of the obvious immediate effects of disease and chemicals, but for some time delayed long term effects was unrecognized.
But DES opened up the reality that, subtle hormonal changes in a developing baby may not emerge as a medical problem until the child reached puberty or might not emerge until much later on in their lives.
The case of DES teaches us that we shouldn’t only be vigilant about the obvious apparent changes that certain chemicals can induce, but we should be wary of the long-term damage they can cause. It also teaches us that chemicals that have little to no effect on adults can have a seriously damaging effect on a baby during its prenatal development.

 

But the most important lesson is...

But the most important lesson of all is that it is possible for living systems to mistake man-made chemicals for an essential human component like a hormone. If DES could so easily be mistaken, then other chemicals could have the same effect in humans.
Endocrine disruptors could eventually become a real cause for concern.