Evaluating predictors of lead exposure for activities disturbing materials painted with or containing lead using historic published data from U.S. workplaces

Objectives

We evaluated predictors of differences in published occupational lead concentrations for activities disturbing material painted with or containing lead in U.S. workplaces to aid historical exposure reconstruction.

Methods

For the aforementioned tasks, 221 air and 113 blood lead summary results (1960–2010) were extracted from a previously developed database. Differences in the natural log-transformed geometric mean (GM) for year, industry, job, and other ancillary variables were evaluated in meta-regression models that weighted each summary result by its inverse variance and sample size.

Results

Air and blood lead GMs declined 5%/year and 6%/year, respectively, in most industries. Exposure contrast in the GMs across the nine jobs and five industries was higher based on air versus blood concentrations. For welding activities, blood lead GMs were 1.7 times higher in worst-case versus non-worst case scenarios.

Conclusions

Job, industry, and time-specific exposure differences were identified; other determinants were too sparse or collinear to characterize. Am. J. Ind. Med. 60:189–197, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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