CHRONIC DISEASE RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH MERCURY VAPOR EXPOSURE

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Aims: To understand the possible health impact of low level mercury vapor exposure. Accomplishments: Initial analyses suggest some elevations in renal disease risk among general dentists compared to orthodontists who do not use mercury but methodologic difficulties and inconsistencies in the data have meant that we have had to redo the analyses. The new analyses still leave an inconsistent picture which we are writing it up for publication .Initial analyses of the blood pressure data suggest an inconsistent relationship between amalgam exposure and blood pressure which is present for some age groups but not for others. Recent studies suggest a relationship between prenatal methyl mercury exposure and blood pressure at age 7 which makes these findings more interesting. We are writing them up for publication. Based on our previous finding of reduced fertility among dental assistants exposed to mercury vapor, Dr. Barbara Davis and Dr. Dan Morgan set up a nose-only mercury vapor exposure chamber to test the hypothesis in rats. We found that mercury had subtle effects on the corpus lutea and estrous cycling but these were unlikely to explain the human findings. We hypothesize that the reproductive effects seen in humans may reflect neurotoxicity of mercury vapor. We have just completed a manuscript on this and are submitting for publication.