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Evaluating predictors of lead exposure for activities disturbing materials painted with or containing lead using historic published data from U.S. workplaces
Author(s) -
Locke Sarah J.,
Deziel Nicole C.,
Koh DongHee,
Graubard Barry I.,
Purdue Mark P.,
Friesen Melissa C.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
american journal of industrial medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.7
H-Index - 104
eISSN - 1097-0274
pISSN - 0271-3586
DOI - 10.1002/ajim.22679
Subject(s) - medicine , lead (geology) , blood lead level , lead exposure , occupational exposure , occupational medicine , environmental health , demography , regression analysis , toxicology , statistics , mathematics , cats , geomorphology , sociology , biology , geology
Objectives We evaluated predictors of differences in published occupational lead concentrations for activities disturbing material painted with or containing lead in U.S. workplaces to aid historical exposure reconstruction. Methods For the aforementioned tasks, 221 air and 113 blood lead summary results (1960–2010) were extracted from a previously developed database. Differences in the natural log‐transformed geometric mean (GM) for year, industry, job, and other ancillary variables were evaluated in meta‐regression models that weighted each summary result by its inverse variance and sample size. Results Air and blood lead GMs declined 5%/year and 6%/year, respectively, in most industries. Exposure contrast in the GMs across the nine jobs and five industries was higher based on air versus blood concentrations. For welding activities, blood lead GMs were 1.7 times higher in worst‐case versus non‐worst case scenarios. Conclusions Job, industry, and time‐specific exposure differences were identified; other determinants were too sparse or collinear to characterize. Am. J. Ind. Med. 60:189–197, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.