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Human blood and serum

REVIEW: yes

DATE: 2013 (references up to 2013)

REF: M. Filella, N. Belzile and Y.-W. Chen. Human exposure to antimony. IV. Contents in human blood. CRITICAL REVIEWS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 43, 2071-2105 (2013).

NUMBER OF REFERENCES IN REVIEW: 122

NUMBER OF CITATIONS (Web of Science™, up to 31 October 2016): 5

PREVIOUS REVIEWS? No

CONCLUSIONS (adapted from the review):

  • The number of studies containing data on antimony is relatively low: 33 for serum/plasma and 36 for whole blood.
  • Antimony concentrations in human blood are very often close to the detection limit of the analytical techniques used. This may lead to an overestimation effect in the antimony concentrations reported.
  • Antimony determination in blood can be subjected to many sources of contamination. This could suggest that published lower concentration values for unexposed persons should be reliable. However, many lower values have been obtained without digesting the sample and, thus, for an element such as antimony that seems to bind appreciably to RBC (red blood cells), may underestimate the real concentration. Unfortunately, the lack of CRMs with antimony concentrations in the right concentration range makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to assess the accuracy of the results published.
  • The number of studies drops from 33 to 21 for serum/plasma (23 values) and from 36 to 17 for whole blood (18 values) if only values for non-exposed individuals are considered. On the basis of these values, it is not possible to establish a value for the contents of antimony in the blood of healthy, nonexposed individuals. It is, however, possible to estimate, on the basis of more recent results, a concentration ceiling at around 1 μg L-1.

PAPERS PUBLISHED AFTER REVIEW OR MISSED: Gao et al., 2012; Azhdarzadeh et al., 2013; Yorita Christensen, 2013; González-Domínguez et al., 2014;  Julander et al., 2014; Li et al., 2014; Zheng et al., 2014; Cai et al., 2015; Chellini et al., 2015; Haglock and Strathmann, 2015; Hinwood et al., 2015; Koç et al., 2015; López et al., 2015; Tu and He, 2015; Barbieri et al., 2016; Barrera et al., 2016; Yuan et al., 2018; Yang et al., 2019.

COMMENTS:

Concentration topics