Freire et al. 2022 - Lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic in donor breast milk in Spain
Freire and colleagues measured lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic in pooled donor breast milk from a Spanish human milk bank. The study is routeable for human-milk exposure evidence because it reports detection frequencies and median milk concentrations for 242 pooled samples from 83 donors. It also identifies donor and dietary predictors of metal concentrations.
Key numbers
- Sample frame: 242 pooled breast milk samples from 83 donors, collected in Spain from 2015 to 2018.
- Detection frequencies: As 97.1%, Hg 81.2%, Pb 50.6%, and Cd 38.0%.
- Median breast milk concentrations: As 1.49 µg/L, Hg 0.26 µg/L, Pb 0.14 µg/L, and Cd <0.04 µg/L.
- Hg was higher in donors with greater intake of fatty fish and meat and lower in samples collected later postpartum.
- Cd detection was associated with university education, fried and canned food intake, and more frequent hand-cream use in the authors’ model.
Methods (brief)
The study measured Pb, Hg, Cd, and As in pooled donor milk and modeled predictors with mixed-effect regression. The source reports total As and total Hg, not inorganic arsenic or methylmercury.
Implications
Certification: This source is human-milk exposure context and should not be pooled with infant formula or cow milk.
Courses: Useful for explaining donor-milk exposure, detection frequency, and dietary predictors.
App: Can support infant feeding exposure context where human milk is represented separately from products.
Wiki pages this source may touch
Verification notes
The same DOI was fetched under Cd, tAs, and tHg human-milk gaps. This page is canonical for those duplicate paths. Total Hg must not be substituted for methylmercury.
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.
| Commit | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0edf3ce | 2026-05-29 | ingest auto-fetched 2026-05-29 0000 batch 2: 10 source pages |