Blood pressure and hypertension in relation to lead exposure updated according to present-day blood lead levels

Lead is an environmental hazard that should be addressed worldwide. Over time, human lead exposure in the western world has fallen drastically to levels comparable to those in humans living in the pre-industrial era, who were mainly exposed to natural sources of lead. To re-evaluate the health risks possibly associated with present-day lead exposure, a three‑pronged approach was applied. First, we critically assessed the recently published population metrics describing the adverse health effects associated with lead exposure at the population level. Next, we summarized the key results of the Study for Promotion of Health in Recycling Lead (SPHERL; NCT02243904) and put these results in perspective with those of the published population metrics. Last but not least, we performed a brief literature review on the present-day lead exposure level in Poland. To our best knowledge, SPHERL is the first prospective study that accounted for interindividual variability between people in their vulnerability to the toxic effects of lead exposure by assessing the participants’ health status before and after occupational lead exposure, with blood pressure and hypertension as one of the primary outcomes. The overall conclusion of this comprehensive review on blood pressure and hypertension is that mainstream ideas about the public and occupational health risks related to lead exposure urgently need to be updated, because a large part of the available literature became obsolete given present-day exposure levels, which sharply declined over the past 40 years