TY - JOUR T1 - Lead concentrations in tibial and calcaneal bone in relation to the history of lead exposure JO - Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health PY - 1998/2VL - 24 IS - 1 SP - 38 EP - 45 AU - Bergdahl, Ingvar A AU - Strömberg, Ulf AU - Gerhardsson, Lars AU - Schütz, Andrejs AU - Chettle, DR AU - Skerfving, Staffan M3 - doi: 10.5271/sjweh.276 UR - https://www.sjweh.fi/show_abstract.php?abstract_id=276 KW - blood KW - calcaneus KW - occupational exposure KW - plasma KW - plasma lead KW - tibia N2 - '

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OBJECTIVES ': 'This study tested a simple model of the relationship between the lead concentration in bone (bone-Pb), exposure time, and lead in plasma (P-Pb) and whole blood (B-Pb) to make it possible to use bone-Pb as a retrospective exposure index.'

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METHODS ': 'Seventy-seven active lead workers and 24 referents were studied. The bone-Pb in tibia (T-Pb) and calcaneus (C-Pb) was measured by in vivo X-ray fluorescence. P-Pb was calculated from B-Pb by use of the nonlinear relationship between these variables. Cumulative B-Pb (cumB-Pb) and P-Pb (cumP-Pb) were calculated to the time of the bone-Pb measurements. In addition, cumP-Pb was adjusted by applying varying rate constants for the transfer of lead from bone to plasma.'

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RESULTS ': 'There were close linear associations between the lead concentrations in tibia (proportion of variance explained, R2=0.78) and calcaneus (R2=0.80), on one hand and the cumB-Pb on the other. The best fit of bone-Pb to the adjusted cumP-Pb (0.79 for T-Pb; 0.82 for C-Pb) was obtained for the terminal phase half-times of 13 and 12 years, respectively.'

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CONCLUSIONS ': 'The combined data on bone-Pb and exposure time make it possible to estimate previous mean P-Pb and B-Pb. Such estimates will be valuable in studies of toxic effects on long-term exposed lead workers when data on the intensity of previous exposure are lacking. The use of P-Pb in modeling bone-Pb kinetics is physiologically relevant, but the use of adjusted cumP-Pb, as compared cumB-Pb, did not significantly change the variance in the relation to bone-Pb.

SN - 0355-3140 ER -