OAN Staff Abril Elfi
6:30 PM – Tuesday, December 3, 2024
A new study has found that exposure to lead in gasoline during childhood resulted in many millions of excess cases of psychiatric disorders over the last 75 years.
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On Wednesday, the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry published a study that detailed the lasting impact by analyzing childhood blood lead levels from 1940 to 2015 in the U.S.
Lead was banned from automobile fuel in 1996.
The study noted that the national population had experienced over 151 million excess mental health disorders that were linked to exposure to lead from car exhaust during early childhood development.
The exposure reportedly increased depression, anxiety, and made generations more inattentive and hyperactive, leading to ADD and ADHD. It also found that it lowered people’s capacity for impulse control in general and made them more inclined to be neurotic.
The study highlights the long-term mental health and personality impacts associated with exposure to lead, particularly for individuals born between 1966 and 1986, with Generation Xers born between 1966 and 1970 facing the highest burden. This period coincides with the peak use of leaded gasoline, which significantly increased environmental and individual lead exposure.
“People born during those years can’t go back in time and change that,” said Post-Doctoral Scholar Aaron Reuben, a co-author of the study.
“Studies like ours today add more evidence that removing lead from our environment and not putting it there in the first place has more benefits than we previously understood,” Reuben said.
Even though lead is no longer present in gasoline, it is still in other sources, including toys imported from foreign countries, water service lines not updated, some soil and paint in older houses before 1978.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated that there is “no safe level” of exposure to lead. The CDC also reported that even small amounts of lead are linked with developmental and learning difficulties, since the exposure is known to harm the brain and the nervous and reproductive systems.
The study combined data on blood lead levels and estimates of historical lead exposure with findings from past studies, including a 2019 study of nearly 600 New Zealand residents that followed kids exposed to lead and measured their mental health over more than three decades.
“The new research doesn’t create new information about whether lead causes harm, nor do we say this is a study that proves causation — we’re really just taking existing evidence and applying it to the whole U.S. population,” Reuben said.
“We’re not at all concerned that we have in any way overestimated the harm,” he added.
Reuben also stated that prevention is the best way to keep people safe.
“We’ve done a lot of good in the U.S. reducing lead exposures. Blood lead levels have gone way down, but they could go down further,” he said. “I hope that we can learn from history about how much harm we caused in the U.S., and try to apply that moving forward.”
Lead was originally added to gasoline to boost engine performance. The use of leaded gas increased after World War II until it proved harmful to catalytic converters, which became mandatory in the 1970s. Some of the hazards of lead were known long before it was banned from gasoline, but reducing exposure to it was not a federal priority for many years.
Lead screenings are now recommended for all young children, with treatment options including chelation therapy to remove the poison if levels are high.
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