Low-level lead exposure and mortality in US adults
thelancet.com
thelancet.com
To be clear then, this study is claiming that half of all cardiovascular deaths in the USA per year are the result of lead exposure? That seems very unlikely given rates of obesity, smoking, and other cardiovascular risk factors.
I’d also like to know what if any interest the hedge fund listed as a funding source would have in this. Plus this...
We declare no competing interests. BPL serves as an expert witness in plaintiff cases of childhood lead poisoning in Milwaukee and Flint, MI, USA, but he receives no personal compensation.
Used to be considered safe below 30 µg/dL. Then 10. Now 5, last I heard. I have no reason to believe the action level will not continue dropping further.
What amount of lead would you consider acceptable in your bloodstream?
As to why they’d do this, the lead author’s role as an expert witness for plaintiffs in cases of lead poisoning seems suggestive.
Everybody is such a big fan of LSD microdosing, and maybe this is the other side of that coin.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/deaths.htm
But that seems to be what they're claiming:
> Population attributable fractions were calculated to show the proportional reduction in all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality, and ischaemic heart disease mortality that would occur if recorded concentrations of lead in blood were reduced to 1·0 μg/dL or lower (≤0·048 μmol/L). The adjusted population attributable fraction for all-cause mortality was 18% (95% CI 10·9–26·1), equivalent to 412 000 (95% CI 250 000–598 000) deaths each year (table 2). Adjusted population attributable fractions were 28·7% (95% CI 15·5–39·5) for cardiovascular disease mortality and 37·4% (23·4–48·6) for ischaemic heart disease mortality, equivalent to 256 000 cardiovascular disease deaths and 185 000 ischaemic heart disease deaths annually (figure 3).
It's a slow burn, and like you said, not linked to well-defined current events. The most you can say is "government continues not to do much about pervasive poisoning of population".
What's this about? Is dust bad if ingested?
They didn't really talk about where the lead came from, but adults living then grew up during the period when leaded gasoline was in common use (banned by the EPA in a five year phase-out period starting in 1995). As well as when lead-based paint was used in homes (it's use was banned in the US starting in 1978). I'd like to see another study in a few years for people born after 2000.
> Although reducing the amount of lead in blood might cut a patient's risk of cardiovascular disease mortality, it is more accurate to view this study as estimating how many deaths might have been prevented if historical exposures to lead had not occurred.
Keeping that type of phrasing, saying something like "Lead might kill up to 412k/year" would be in the realm of reasonable.
This type of headline manipulation is how the media turns good science into bad science.
My opinion is still that translates better to "kills 412k per year" than "might kill up to 412k per year."
I could see "might kill up to 598k per year" or "kills at least 250k per year" from their confidence interval.
Why do you think it should say "might" and "up to"?
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, please do so in a comment. Then your view is on a level playing field with everyone else's.
Given the experimental evidence mentioned in the introduction of the paper, it's likely that some or many of these deaths could be due to lead, but they could also be due to shared causes. There could be other things that lead to both greater lead exposure and greater cardiac death, for example.
One has to be very very careful with drawing conclusions from surveys such as this one. The standard in epidemiology is usually, association + one potential mechanism, but even with that it doesn't mean that the one potential mechanism is an explanation for all the observed association.