Exposure to arsenic in drinking water is associated with increased prevalence of diabetes: a cross-sectional study in the Zimapán and Lagunera regions in Mexico

Environmental Health

Research

Jenna M Currier¹  Olga L Valenzuela²  Luz M Del Razo²  Erika Hernández Castellanos²  Luz C Sánchez-Peña²  Zuzana Drobná³  Miroslav Stýblo³  Gonzalo G García-Vargas⁴  Dana Loomis⁵ 

[1] Curriculum in Toxicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA;Departamento de Toxicología, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional, México DF, Mexico;Department of Nutrition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA;Facultad de Medicina, Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango, Gómez Palacio, Durango, Mexico;School of Community Health Sciences/MS-274, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA (Current affiliation: Department of Epidemiology and Eppley Cancer Institute, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE, USA;

关键词: Arsenic;    drinking water;    diabetes;    urinary metabolites of arsenic;    dimethylarsinite;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1476-069X-10-73

 received in 2011-05-24, accepted in 2011-08-24,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundHuman exposures to inorganic arsenic (iAs) have been linked to an increased risk of diabetes mellitus. Recent laboratory studies showed that methylated trivalent metabolites of iAs may play key roles in the diabetogenic effects of iAs. Our study examined associations between chronic exposure to iAs in drinking water, metabolism of iAs, and prevalence of diabetes in arsenicosis-endemic areas of Mexico.MethodsWe used fasting blood glucose (FBG), fasting plasma insulin (FPI), oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), and insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) to characterize diabetic individuals. Arsenic levels in drinking water and urine were determined to estimate exposure to iAs. Urinary concentrations of iAs and its trivalent and pentavalent methylated metabolites were measured to assess iAs metabolism. Associations between diabetes and iAs exposure or urinary metabolites of iAs were estimated by logistic regression with adjustment for age, sex, hypertension and obesity.ResultsThe prevalence of diabetes was positively associated with iAs in drinking water (OR 1.13 per 10 ppb, p < 0.01) and with the concentration of dimethylarsinite (DMAsIII) in urine (OR 1.24 per inter-quartile range, p = 0.05). Notably, FPI and HOMA-IR were negatively associated with iAs exposure (β -2.08 and -1.64, respectively, p < 0.01), suggesting that the mechanisms of iAs-induced diabetes differ from those underlying type-2 diabetes, which is typically characterized by insulin resistance.ConclusionsOur study confirms a previously reported, but frequently questioned, association between exposure to iAs and diabetes, and is the first to link the risk of diabetes to the production of one of the most toxic metabolites of iAs, DMAsIII.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Del Razo et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.