Cardio-Pulmonary Effects of Metal Fume Exposure

This project is a 20-year investigation of the cardiovascular and respiratory effects of inhaled metal fumes among a population of welders in the Eastern Massachusetts region.

Welding is a fabrication process that is used to join metals for structural integrity.  The fumes released during the welding process include heavy metals, ozone, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen oxides. These compounds are associated with lung and systemic inflammation with adverse cardiac effects, as well as cancer risk. 

This NIH- (NIEHS) and CDC- (NIOSH) funded work involved a repeated measures study of short-term, as well as long-term, outcomes. The approach taken was a molecular epidemiologic investigation of biomarkers of physiological, biochemical, and epigenetic changes after exposure, while measuring personal exposures with monitors as well as using blood and urine exposomics markers.

This work resulted in numerous papers on various aspects of early physiologic changes, such as short-term (hours) exposure to fine particulate matter (PM) effects on cardiac autonomic function (as measured by changes in heart rate variability, HRV), vascular function as measured by changes in blood pressure and arterial stiffness measured by Pulse Wave Analysis (PWA); long-term (years) PM exposure effects from both occupational and non-occupational sources (welding and fossil fuel burning; ambient and home exposures) on vascular function, and systemic inflammation; short-term PM exposure in relation to epigenome-wide changes in peripheral blood and nasal brushings, as measured by DNA methylation and a study of PM-induced profile changes of plasma proteins (proteomics) identified within functionally relevant pathways.  Through pathway-based data mining of our existing gene expression data, as well as newly generated DNA methylation data, we  identified pathway-specific candidate biomarkers of early stage responses to metal-rich particulate exposures.

This work is supported by the NIH (Grant # R01ES00986) and CDC (Grant #T42OH008416).