Capstone Presentation:

The topic being studied at the presentation on Friday was Bisphenol A (hereby referred to as BPA), the chemical described as synthetic estrogen, present in many hard plastics found in everyday life especially bottles. There are many health risks to this organic chemical if it enters the body. It can potentially lower sperm count, result in sterilization as well as breast cancer. The current Canadian and U.S. limit of non harmful BPA consumption is 25 mg/ day.

The student who conducted the experiment aimed to test how long BPA would last in a fetus if consumed. She compartmentalized the body and used an ODE per compartment to model the flow of BPA in it. She derived a number of equations testing the dosage of BPA and the time in lasts in first body and thereby the fetus. She also used a physiological based pharmacokinetic model to test what the body does to the drug once its enters.

To graph the equations, she used Kawamoto et Al's model. She combined BPA as glucogen and the actual amount of drug in the body to plot a single line. She questioned whether BPA would disappear from a fetus over a period of time but she ultimately found that it remained at a constant rate within the fetus.

The student then took all her 27 equations from the compartmentalized study of the body and used varying toy model of bodies and fetuses to arrive at a single equation through nondimensionalization(i.e., making all main variables dimensionless).

The implications of her study were that BPA products should now be outlawed as it has been in Canada. Surprisingly enough baby bottles still cotain a significant amount of BPA in other parts of the world.

Through mathermatical modeling, the equations she arrived at concluded that a contstant low level of BPA will always remain in a fetus if injected at any given point in time. Also, doubling the dose of BPA will double the level of it remaining in the fetus.

I thought the study was very interesting and had a lot of relevant knowledge. The extrapolation of her data on the graph plotted bothered me a little, but someone asked the question in class and she seemed to prove it made sense even though i'm not entirely convinced. That is mainly because I didn't really understand the Kawamoto et Al's model used in the study.