London Civil Servants

Blood cadmium was measured in 466 randomly selected London civil servants not exposed to heavy metals at work. Blood cadmium ranged from 3.6 to 75.6 nmol/L (0.4 to 8.5 ng/L) with a geometric mean of 6.4 nmot/L (0.7 u.g/L) in non-smokers and 13.6 nmol/L (1.5 u.g/L) in smokers (p<0.001). Blood cadmium was higher in women than in men (9.5 ver-sus 7.8 nmol/L) and was inversely correlated with employment grade (p<0.001). The associations with age, body weight and alcohol intake were not significant. After adjusting for gender and the number of cigarettes smoked per day, 36 % of the variance of blood cadmium was explained, while the contribution of employment grade was not significant. There was an unexpected negative relationship between serum creatinine and blood cadmium in men (r--0.16; p<0.01). This was not true in women (r = +0.03), but the correlation remained present in men after adjustment for age, body mass index and smoking. In contrast, in the two sexes, the correlations between blood pressure and blood cad-mium were weak and not statistically significant. In conclusion, in unexposed subjects, gender and smoking are important determinants of blood cadmium. In addi-tion, a low level of environmental exposure to cadmium is not associated with a deterioration of renal function or an increase in blood pressure. Cadium is a heavy metal, which during life accumu