Association Between Urinary Glyphosate Exposure and Cognitive Impairment in Older Adults from NHANES 2013-2014

Glyphosate is the most commonly used herbicide with potential neurotoxicity. However, limited epidemical evidence is found in the relationship between glyphosate and cognitive impairment, especially in the cognitive-disrupting sensitive elderly populations.

This study aimed to examine the association of urinary glyphosate exposure with cognitive impairment in the United State (US) older adults.

Cognitive impairment was determined by the following four tests: the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's disease (CERAD) Immediate Recall test (IR), the CERAD Delayed Recall tests (DR), the Animal Fluency (AF) test and the Digit Substitution test (DSST). Survey weighted logistic regression and restricted cubic splines were applied to evaluate and visualize the association between glyphosate and cognitive impairment.

A total of 465 elderly adults were identified in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2013-2014 cycle, and among them, 83.87% individuals had detectable urinary levels of glyphosate (0.628 ng/mL in average). After adjusting for the potential covariates, glyphosate was significantly linked to increased DR and AF impairment, and the corresponding ORs were 1.52 (1.01 to 2.30, p = 0.049) and 1.69 (1.11 to 2.59, p = 0.019), respectively. No significant association was identified between glyphosate and IR or DSST impairment. The RCS plot further confirmed the linear and positive relationships between glyphosate and DR and AF impairment.

These findings suggested that exposure to glyphosate might be associated with declined cognitive function in the elderly, and it might be prudent to evaluate cognitive outcomes for aged individuals with glyphosate exposures.