Kazimov & Alieva 2014 — Heavy-metal dietary intake and absorbed-dose risk in Baku adults

Kazimov and Alieva (2014) conducted a questionnaire-based dietary survey of 57 adults in Baku, Azerbaijan, chemically analyzing 18 food items from the daily diet for Pb, Cd, Cr, Ni, Cu, and Zn and measuring the same six metals in blood and hair from 17 of the subjects. The authors compute hazard quotients (measured concentration / domestic maximum permissible concentration, “ПДК”) per food category, then derive daily intake and absorbed-dose risk ratios versus Russian/CIS reference values. The headline finding is that Cr and Ni intakes drive dose risk ratios of 1.31 (low risk) and 3.77 (elevated risk) respectively, while Pb, Cd, Cu, and Zn risk ratios sit at 0.15–0.58 (no risk per the authors’ classification). Hazard quotients for individual food categories show Cr and Ni far exceeding domestic limits in nearly every food (Cr up to 42× in beef; Ni up to 19× in butter), while Pb and Cd remain at or below domestic limits in most categories — with the notable exception of butter, both cheeses, greens, and carrot (Pb/Cd hazard quotient ≥ 1 in at least one of the two metals).

Key numbers

Concentration ranges across 18 food items (mg/kg, AAS, wet basis as marketed)

• Zn 1.80–59.95
• Cr 0.48–10.53
• Ni 0.49–3.65
• Cu 0.30–8.20
• Pb 0.04–0.98
• Cd 0.01–0.18

Maximum Pb and Cd were both observed in fish (0.18–0.98 mg/kg combined range cited by the authors). Major Zn, Cr, Ni, and Cu contributions to the ration came from meat (e.g., lamb 3.65–35.35 mg/kg per element) and bread/grain products (2.80–36.92 mg/kg per element).

Hazard quotients by food category — Table 1 (measured concentration / ПДК)

Categories with at least one metal at or above ПДК (hazard quotient ≥ 1): butter (Pb, Cd, Cr, Ni); brynza cheese (Pb, Cd, Cr, Ni); Dutch cheese (Pb, Cd, Cr, Ni); sunflower oil (Cr, Ni); greens (Pb, Cd, Cr, Ni); bread (Cr, Ni); cereals (Cr, Ni, Cu); beef/lamb/chicken (Cr, Ni); fish (Pb/Cd/Cr/Ni all near unity); eggs (Cr, Cu); milk/dairy (Cr, Ni, Cu); potato (Cr, Ni); carrot (Cd at unity, Cr, Ni). Pb and Cd hazard quotients exceeded unity in butter (1.4 / 1.5), brynza and Dutch cheese (1.4 / 1.0), greens (1.24 / 1.0), and carrot (Cd 1.0 only). Cr hazard quotients exceeded unity in every food category except fish. Ni hazard quotients exceeded unity in every food category except fish (0.98) and bread (1.4, borderline).

Average daily dietary intake versus reference values — Table 2

Absorption coefficients applied to convert intake to absorbed dose: Pb 0.50, Cd 0.40, Cr 0.66, Ni 0.50, Cu 0.25, Zn 0.50 (per the cited Russian methodological guidelines).

Dose risk ratios and risk characterization — Table 3

Heavy metals in blood and hair — Table 4 (n = 17)

Author commentary on biological media: “only Cr, Ni, and Zn in blood exceeded physiological norm.” Numerically, the Cr blood mean (0.42) sits inside the cited 0.1–0.5 range, Ni (0.28) inside 0.1–1.0, and Zn (0.98) inside 0.7–1.10; the “exceeded physiological norm” claim is a discussion-narrative judgment about position within the reference range rather than a strict numerical exceedance. Hair concentrations of every metal except Cd were stated to exceed reference values “by 2–5×”; the printed values in Table 4 mostly sit inside the cited hair-reference ranges, and the 2–5× claim is again a discussion-narrative statement rather than a Table-4 numerical exceedance. The wiki reports the numerical table as printed; the narrative discrepancies are noted in Verification notes.

Correlations: r = 0.93–0.97 between food concentration and dietary intake for Cr, Ni, Cu, and Zn (authors do not separate the four into individual coefficients).

Methods (brief)

Subjects: 57 adults (28 men, 29 women, ages 19–49) selected by random sampling from Baku. Dietary intake quantified via questionnaire interview per cited Russian methodological guidelines.

Food sampling: 18 food items spanning the daily ration — bread (wheat bread, rolls from premium-grade flour), various cereals/groats, beef, lamb, chicken, fish, eggs, butter, sunflower oil, milk, sour cream, kefir, brynza cheese, Dutch cheese, potato, carrot, and mixed greens.

Analytical method: atomic absorption spectrometry on a Shimadzu instrument (the methods text labels it “XRF-18000”; both the abstract and the methods narrative state AAS — the “XRF-18000” designation is an internal inconsistency in the source rather than a switch to X-ray fluorescence). Analyses performed in the geochemical laboratory of the Institute of Geology, National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan.

Biological media: blood and hair from 17 of the 57 subjects; same instrument.

Hazard quotients: measured food concentration divided by domestic maximum permissible concentration (ПДК) per SanPiN 2.3.2.1078-01 (Russian/CIS sanitary rules and norms for food safety and nutritional value). Daily intake and absorbed dose derived from the food consumption inventory × measured per-food concentrations × absorption coefficients drawn from cited Russian methodological guidelines (Pb 0.50, Cd 0.40, Cr 0.66, Ni 0.50, Cu 0.25, Zn 0.50). Risk ratio = actual absorbed dose / reference absorbed dose, classified by a four-band scheme (no risk / low risk / elevated risk / high risk) drawn from a Russian xenobiotic-risk methodological guidance document.

Statistics: t-test in Microsoft Excel.

Key methodological caveats for wiki use: (a) Cr is reported as total Cr — speciation between Cr(III) and Cr(VI) is not addressed and the hazard quotients of 4.8–42× should be read in that light. (b) The ПДК limits referenced are Russian/CIS norms that are stricter than EU/Codex limits for several metals (notably Cr) — a 42× exceedance of ПДК is not the same statement as a 42× exceedance of EU or Codex levels. (c) Hg, iAs/tAs, Sn, Al, Sb are not in the analytical panel. (d) The five-fold range of Cr ПДК stringency between Russian/CIS and EU frameworks is one of several known reasons the authors’ “elevated risk” finding for Ni and “low risk” for Cr should be compared to other dose-risk frameworks before applying to certification or regulatory work in non-CIS jurisdictions.

Implications

Certification: Pb and Cd hazard quotients at or above unity in five specific categories (butter, two cheeses, greens, carrot) are evidence that — under Russian/CIS limits — these matrix-metal pairs are at or near regulatory ceiling in the Baku-2014 retail food supply. The certification implication is moderate: HMTc certification thresholds are normally tighter than CIS ПДК, so a category at 1.0× ПДК for Pb is not automatically a “safe” category for HMTc purposes; it depends on whether the absolute mg/kg value (which the paper does not print per category in this preserved form — the paper publishes hazard ratios, not absolute concentrations per category) sits below the HMTc threshold. Ni absorbed-dose risk of 3.77 is the headline single-source signal for nickel exposure from a mixed adult diet in this region.

Courses: Useful teaching case for hazard-quotient methodology versus absorbed-dose methodology, and for illustrating how the choice of regulatory framework (Russian/CIS vs EU/Codex) and the choice of Cr speciation (total Cr vs Cr-VI) materially change the apparent severity of food-supply heavy-metal exposure. Also a worked example of the difference between hazard quotients in food vs absorbed-dose risk ratios in the consumer — the same dataset produces “Cr is 4.8–42× ПДК in food” and “Cr dose risk = 1.31, low risk” simultaneously.

App: Limited direct applicability for app concentration profiles — the paper publishes hazard quotients (concentration ÷ ПДК) rather than raw mg/kg per food category. The min/max concentration ranges across all 18 foods are reported (Zn 1.80–59.95 down to Cd 0.01–0.18 mg/kg) but cannot be deconvolved into per-food concentrations without back-calculating from the hazard quotients and the underlying ПДК values.

Verification notes

Enhancement run 2026-05-18 (cite-key existed before the v2 manual-fetch schema cutover; previously updated 2026-05-14). Defects corrected against the source PDF:

• Expanded metals: from [Pb, Cd, Cr, Ni] to [Pb, Cd, Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn]. The paper measures all six metals in food, blood, and hair (Table 1 row labels; Table 2 column headers; Table 4 row labels). The prior frontmatter omitted Cu and Zn.
• Replaced narrative “Pb and Cd remained within limits except in sunflower oil” + “Only in подсолнечном масле their concentrations составили 1,4–1,5 ПДК” with the correct Table 1 attribution. The source’s discussion text on page 707 says “только в подсолнечном масле их концентрации составили 1,4–1,5 ПДК”, but Table 1 explicitly assigns hazard quotients 1.4 (Pb) and 1.5 (Cd) to сливочное масло (butter), while подсолнечное масло (sunflower oil) is at 0.8 / 0.8 — both well below ПДК. The paper’s discussion text is internally inconsistent with its own Table 1. Table 1 is the structured numerical record and is treated as the authoritative source; the narrative typo is noted but not propagated. Five food categories (butter, brynza, Dutch cheese, greens, carrot) exceed ПДК on at least one of Pb or Cd; the prior page narrative reduced this to a single (incorrectly named) category.
• Expanded the Table 1 hazard-quotient section from 9 categories (bread, cereals, beef, lamb, chicken, fish, potato, carrot, sunflower oil) to the full 15 categories printed in the source (added eggs, butter, milk and dairy, brynza cheese, Dutch cheese, greens). All 15 rows are quoted exactly as printed in the PDF.
• Added the full Table 2 (daily intake and absorbed-dose values vs reference), Table 3 (per-metal dose risk ratios with the authors’ four-band risk classification), and Table 4 (blood and hair concentrations for all six metals with reference ranges). The prior page summarized Table 3 in a single sentence and Table 4 in a single sentence and omitted Table 2 entirely.
• Added the explicit absorption-coefficient list (Pb 0.50, Cd 0.40, Cr 0.66, Ni 0.50, Cu 0.25, Zn 0.50) — a methodologically load-bearing parameter the prior page omitted.
• Added [[ingredients/cereals]], [[ingredients/beef]], [[ingredients/chicken]], [[ingredients/eggs]], [[ingredients/butter]], [[ingredients/sunflower-oil]], [[ingredients/milk-and-dairy]], [[ingredients/fresh-herbs]] to the ingredients array. Removed the invented [[ingredients/grains]] slug (not in taxonomy; cereals is the current vocabulary). Normalized [[ingredients/potato]] → [[ingredients/potatoes]] (taxonomy has the plural). Preserved [[ingredients/bread]], [[ingredients/meat]], [[ingredients/fish]], [[ingredients/carrot]].
• Added oil, blood, and hair to matrices: (the source covers food + biomonitoring; the prior matrices array omitted the biomonitoring side and the major oil-product categories that drove Pb/Cd hazard quotients).
• Replaced the legacy heading ## Implications with the same heading restructured to the standard Certification/Courses/App sub-block format (already present in template), kept; added the missing ## Verification notes section.
• Replaced the legacy heading ## Wiki pages updated on ingest with ## Wiki pages this source may touch per the 2026-05-08 schema convention.
• Removed the broken [[health/dietary-exposure-assessment]] wikilink (no such page exists on disk; wiki/health/ contains only index.md and a cat-2 page).
• Clarified that the AAS / “XRF-18000” labeling in the source is an internal paper inconsistency (abstract and methods narrative both say AAS; the instrument-model token “XRF-18000” is anomalous for Shimadzu’s AAS line and is reported as printed without inferring a different instrument).
• Tightened publication: to include volume, issue, and page range (“Kazanskiy Meditsinskiy Zhurnal (Kazan Medical Journal), vol. 95, no. 5, pp. 706–709”).
• Expanded sample_population to flag that the 57-subject dietary cohort and the 17-subject biomonitoring sub-cohort are distinct subsets, and that the sampling was randomized within Baku.
• Set doi: null with no_doi_assigned: true. The PDF has no DOI imprint; the Kazan Medical Journal did not assign DOIs to all 2014 articles, and the present article does not carry one.

Paper-internal discrepancies flagged (data faithfully reported, judgment deferred to readers):

• Table 1 vs discussion text on the butter/sunflower-oil attribution (see above).
• Discussion narrative says “only Cr, Ni, Zn in blood exceeded physiological norm”; Table 4 prints all three within their reference ranges (Cr 0.42 inside 0.1–0.5; Ni 0.28 inside 0.1–1.0; Zn 0.98 inside 0.7–1.10). Reported as the authors stated; the wiki notes the numerical position in the range.
• Discussion narrative says “hair concentrations of all metals exceeded reference by 2–5×”; Table 4 prints most hair means inside their cited reference ranges. Reported as printed.
• Discussion narrative on page 707 states the Ni hazard-quotient range across foods is “1.4–11.43”; Table 1 prints Ni for butter as 19 (and Ni for sunflower oil as 11.43). The 11.43 value the narrative quotes is the sunflower-oil cell, not the table maximum. The page reports the Table 1 numbers as printed and flags the discrepancy here (audit subagent 2026-05-18 finding; verified against PDF p. 707).
• “XRF-18000” instrument label inside the methods paragraph despite an AAS analytical approach in the abstract and methods narrative. Reported as printed.

Preserved fields per v2 skill rule: cite_key, raw_handle: papers-cube, raw_path, near_duplicates, evidence_tier: B, license: unknown, source_type: peer-reviewed, jurisdictions: [AZ], sample_n: 57, products: ["[[products/fresh-fish]]"].

Wiki pages this source may touch

• lead
• cadmium
• chromium
• nickel
• copper
• zinc
• bread
• cereals
• meat
• beef
• chicken
• fish
• eggs
• butter
• sunflower-oil
• milk-and-dairy
• potatoes
• carrot
• fresh-herbs
• fresh-fish

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.