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I have been with my husband 13 years. He is a 42 year old male who had lead poisoning back in 1962.he had a lot of problems as a child due to the lead poisoning. He has learning disabilities and had seizures. I have been browsing web sights trying to see if there are studies that have been done on people who had severe lead poisoning back then and how they are now. He was seizure free for 13 years and took no medicines this past week they returned with a vengeance. My question although it probably can not be answered is why. Is this an outcome of something so long ago? When he was a child he spent most of his childhood in a hospital in Rochester NY. I think he thought the effects from the lead were gone. How wrong we were. They used to be convulsions and then went into gran mal seizures. Are there any studies that have been done on the long term effects from lead? If so please forward some information to me. I want to know everything there is to know about this. Thankyou

Dear Miss Rushey,

Thank you for your enquiry and patience. We apologise for the late reply. Due to the immense number of emails we get from our website, it takes us a while to get through all of them. To answer your question regarding the studies carried out on the long term effects of lead, I have included a couple of articles that might interest you.

The first article by Herbert L. Needleman, M.D., Alan Schell, M.A., David Bellinger, Ph.D., Alan Leviton, M.D., and Elizabeth N. Allred, M.S. N Engl J Med 1990; 322: 83-88 January 11, 1990  The long-term effects of exposure to low doses of lead in childhood. An 11-year follow-up report, on lead exposure in primary school children and its effects later on in life, when they are 18 years old. This article does mention long term effects but the study is only done on 18 year olds affected earlier in life and not in adults. The author may have written new articles with focus on the long term effects in adults, so you may be able to do a web search for him.

The second article by Howard Hu, MD, ScD; Antonio Aro, PhD; Marinelle Payton, MD, PhD; Susan Korrick, MD, MPH; David Sparrow, DSc; Scott T. Weiss, MD, MS; Andrea Rotnitzky, PhD. JAMA April 17, 1996, Vol 275, No. 15: 1171-1176. The Relationship of Bone and Blood Lead to Hypertension The Normative Aging Study is a study on the long term accumulation of lead in bones. However, this study was conducted on men who have had long term exposure to lead, rather than childhood exposure to lead.

With regards to your husbands seizures, we would like to also advise you to consult a neurologist to identify the cause of these seizures. This is because lead is only one of the possibilities of the cause of seizures, and that it could be something else.

We hope you will find this information useful. If you would like to pose this question to other people affected by the same problem, you could also join the LeadWorkers E-group, c/o The LEAD Group Inc. The LeadWorkers E-group was set up by the Global Lead Advice & Support Service (GLASS) in April 2005 in response to enquiries from lead workers around the world seeking support and advice from other people lead poisoned at work and seeking information on the management of lead at work and appropriate responses to lead poisoning of workers. It's a moderated self-help group you can join online, with public access to archived emails via http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/LeadWorkers.

Thanks,
Regards,
Elisa Idris
Volunteer Information Officer