Chen et al. 2017 - Newcomer women’s metal biomonitoring review

Chen and colleagues scoped the literature on lead, mercury, and cadmium body burdens and exposure sources among newcomer women. The review is exposure and source-attribution context for biomonitoring, not a cookware or consumer-product occurrence survey. Its quantitative values come from the reviewed primary studies and should remain review-level context unless those primary papers are ingested directly.

Key numbers

• Literature screen: 420 articles identified through MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Scopus; 10 articles selected for full textual review.
• Metals covered: Pb, Hg, and Cd. Lead was the main metal examined, with 8 studies investigating Pb body burdens; 3 studies examined Hg and 1 surveyed blood Cd.
• Biomarker scope: all included studies investigated blood as a biomarker; some also reported umbilical-cord blood or urinary Hg.
• Reported mean Pb levels ranged from geometric mean 0.78 ug/dL (95% CI: 0.57, 1.10) in immigrants to Canada to 29.5 ug/dL (95% CI: 25.9, 33.1) in immigrant Pb-poisoned pregnant women with pica in New York City.
• Bakhireva et al. pregnancy cohort: 3 of 140 participants had blood Pb levels at or above 3 ug/dL, specifically 3.4 ug/dL, 5.6 ug/dL, and 8.5 ug/dL. The mean blood Pb level among the 39 analyzed samples was 1.06 ug/dL (95% CI: 0.57, 1.55), range 0.26-8.5 ug/dL.
• Gulson et al. migrant women in Australia: combined geometric mean blood Pb was 2.73 ug/dL; pregnant women 2.76 ug/dL and non-pregnant migrants 2.77 ug/dL.
• Thihalolipavan et al. Pb-poisoned pregnant women in New York City: pica eaters (n = 43 of 491) had blood Pb 29.5 ug/dL (95% CI: 25.9, 33.1), compared with non-pica eaters 23.8 ug/dL (95% CI: 22.9, 24.7).
• Rastogi et al. Brooklyn chart review of pregnant women with blood Pb at or above 10 ug/dL: mean blood Pb 16.82 ug/dL (95% CI: 14.82, 18.82) before intervention and 11.48 ug/dL after nutritional supplementation and educational interventions.
• Wu et al. 2009 Taiwan study: immigrant women from Vietnam, Mainland China, and Southeast Asia had blood Pb 2.23 ug/dL (95% CI: 1.84, 2.62) versus native women 1.63 ug/dL (95% CI: 1.41, 1.85), p = 0.04.
• Wu et al. 2013 Taiwan study: recent immigrants had blood Pb 2.67 ug/dL (95% CI: 2.45, 2.89), less recent immigrants 2.40 ug/dL (95% CI: 2.21, 2.59), and non-immigrants 2.33 ug/dL (95% CI: 2.17, 2.49); recent immigrants differed significantly from non-immigrants, p = 0.003.
• Curren et al. Canadian Health Measures Survey: Canadian foreign-born women had blood Pb 0.78 ug/dL (95% CI: 0.57, 1.10), blood Hg 0.88 ug/L (95% CI: 0.55, 1.40), and blood Cd 0.59 ug/L (95% CI: 0.42, 0.83). Canadian-born women had blood Pb 0.57 ug/dL (95% CI: 0.53, 0.61), Hg 0.40 ug/L (95% CI: 0.32, 0.50), and Cd 0.46 ug/L (95% CI: 0.38, 0.55).
• Geer et al. predominantly immigrant community in the United States: cord-blood Hg geometric mean 2.14 ug/L (95% CI: 1.76, 2.60) and maternal urinary Hg geometric mean 0.45 ug/L (95% CI: 0.37, 0.55).
• Soon et al. Hawaii maternal-child cohort: mean cord-blood mercury was 5.20 ug/L (95% CI: 4.08, 6.33), and 44% of women had cord-blood Hg at or above 5 ug/L. Percentages at or above 5 ug/L were Japanese 56.5%, Caucasian 42.9%, Chinese 34.8%, Hispanic 33.3%, and Filipino 28.1%.
• Exposure sources identified by the review included pica behaviour, lead-glazed cookware, eye cosmetics, fish and shellfish consumption, and occupational or origin-country exposures such as lead-battery work.

Methods (brief)

The authors searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Scopus for terms combining newcomer, immigrant, refugee, or migrant status with lead, mercury, cadmium, metals, and biological-marker terms. Included papers had to report blood Pb, Hg, or Cd for newcomer populations or stratify metal concentrations by foreign birth. Literature reviews, case studies, and papers without relevant biomarker stratification were excluded.

For the included studies, the authors extracted blood Pb, Hg, and Cd concentrations, cord-blood results, maternal urinary Hg where available, country or region of origin, comparison-population values, and exposure-source information. The review does not pool the studies statistically.

Implications

Certification: This source is not a product-occurrence dataset and should not enter any HMTc product benchmark pool. It supports exposure, biomonitoring, and source-attribution context for women of reproductive age and migrant populations.

Courses: Useful for showing how cultural practices, migration history, origin-country exposure, and current diet can affect biomarker interpretation.

App: Can support exposure-context flags for lead, mercury, and cadmium in biomonitoring education, but not brand or product rankings.

Microbiome: No microbiome findings.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• lead
• cadmium
• mercury
• mercury-methyl
• index

Verification notes

• DOI, title, authors, journal, license, search yield, inclusion count, metals covered, biomarker matrices, and all numerical values in Key numbers were transcribed from the extracted PDF text.
• Units are preserved exactly by biomarker type: blood Pb in ug/dL, blood Hg and Cd in ug/L, cord-blood Hg in ug/L, and urinary Hg in ug/L where the source reports those units.
• Mercury speciation is kept distinct: most review values are unqualified Hg and are tagged as tHg; Soon et al. is included under MeHg because the table labels the metal of interest as MeHg.
• Products and ingredients are intentionally empty because the paper is a biomonitoring scoping review, not an occurrence survey of cookware, cosmetics, fish, shellfish, or any named consumer product.

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.