Bzikowska-Jura et al. 2024 - Essential and non-essential elements in Polish human milk

This Scientific Reports study measured 18 elements in human milk from 30 exclusively breastfeeding mothers in Poland and estimated infant exposure from measured milk intake. Arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, mercury, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, tin, lead, and thallium were detected in all samples. Tin was above the WHO usual-level comparison in every sample, and lead was above that comparison in one-third of samples.

Key numbers

Table 3 reports human-milk element concentrations in ug/L for N=30:

Additional Table 3 means in ug/L include Al 305.3, Ba 2.84, Be 0.08, Co 0.07, Cu 323.7, Mn 2.47, Mo 1.19, Th 0.10, Tl 0.2, and U 0.03. Vanadium had 90% left-censored results, so the authors did not calculate descriptive statistics for V.

The study reports mean infant milk intake of 502.1 +/- 58.8 mL/day and mean current infant weight of 4666.7 +/- 391.1 g in Table 2.

Methods (brief)

Mothers collected pooled 24-hour milk samples at 4-6 weeks postpartum. Samples were microwave digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide. As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Mn, Ni, Pb, Tl, and V were measured by ICP-MS using an Agilent 7700x system; mercury was measured by atomic absorption with a DMA-80 mercury analyzer. The paper reports method LODs and LOQs for all 18 elements in Table 1.

Implications

The source supports human-milk occurrence evidence and infant-exposure context for Poland. It should remain separate from infant formula or commercial infant-food benchmark pools. The arsenic and mercury results are total/source-reported values and cannot substitute for inorganic arsenic or methylmercury.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• human-milk
• breastmilk
• infant-food-general
• lead
• cadmium
• arsenic
• mercury
• nickel
• tin

Verification notes

The PDF includes DOI, authors, journal, year, methods, LOD/LOQ table, and Table 3 concentration values. The authors state that results are expressed in mg/kg wet weight in the methods paragraph, but the occurrence table itself is labeled ug/L; this page preserves the table’s ug/L basis. Table 5 infant-intake rows appear vulnerable to extraction/OCR ambiguity, so this page uses Table 3 concentrations and Table 2 milk-intake metadata as the primary occurrence facts. Both human-milk and breastmilk exist locally; the matrix term is normalized to breast-milk.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.