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High Lead and Low Iron
What You Need to Know to Keep Your Baby Safe
By Kelly Burgess
The trickiest thing about lead exposure is that it's not obvious that your child may have measurable blood lead levels, says Dr. Richard Canfield, a senior research associate at Cornell's Division of Nutritional Sciences, and author of a number of studies showing lead's deleterious effects on children's IQ.
"You shouldn't expect to see your child behave differently unless they have very high exposures," Dr. Canfield says. "But at low exposures you see a long-term decline or deficit in their IQ scores. Children at levels even below 10 µg/dl have IQs that measure lower than children who have blood levels that are much lower."
In addition to IQ decreases, notes Dr. Canfield, there is evidence that children with lead levels below 10 µg/dl have visual spatial defects and some executive function deficits related to problem solving. That means that a child with low level lead exposure may tend to try to jump to solving a problem before he or she has all the information and has time to reflect on it, i.e., an impulse control issue. Another problem may be inappropriate perseverance, or the tendency to persevere in trying to solve a problem in a certain manner even after it has become clear that the attempted solution is incorrect.
Dr. Lanphear says that if we could eliminate lead exposure in our population to virtually zero, we would see increased IQs across the population, as well as decreases in strokes, renal failure, cognitive deficits and ADHD.
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