Lead Exposure Might Have Significantly Lower the IQ of Many Americans

Lead Exposure Might Have Significantly Lower the IQ of Many Americans
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Unfortunately, exposure to lead is not something that we should take lightly. It’s enough to eat or just breath in dust from deteriorating lead-based paint to deal with lead poisoning. Joint or muscle pain, headaches, high blood pressure, problems regarding memory and concentrations are all symptoms of lead poisoning.

A new study that ScienceAlert.com writes about is once again raising the problem of lead exposure during childhood in the US.

Over half of Americans had been exposed to worrying lead levels during childhood

The same study claims that over 170 million adults from the US are at greater risk of serious health problems because of lead exposure while they were children. That’s more than 54 percent of Americans. To come to the new findings, researchers analyzed data on blood-lead levels and leaded gas use from 1940.

As it results from what we wrote above, lead poisoning can severely affect mental health, leading to everlasting difficulties when it comes to learning.

Aaron Reuben, a clinical psychologist, explained:

Millions of us are walking around with a history of lead exposure,
It’s not like you got into a car accident and had a rotator cuff tear that heals and then you’re fine. It appears to be an insult carried in the body in different ways that we’re still trying to understand but that can have implications for life.

Another official and important statement wrote:

By providing more complete estimates of the number of people exposed to lead in early life, this study makes a considerable step toward understanding the full extent of the damage done to the US population in one specific domain: cognitive ability.

Hopefully, people will learn more about how to stay away from getting exposed to lead.

The new study was published in PNAS.


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Even since he was a child, Cristian was staring curiously at the stars, wondering about the Universe and our place in it. Today he's seeing his dream come true by writing about the latest news in astronomy. Cristian is also glad to be covering health and other science topics, having significant experience in writing about such fields.

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