Car exhaust fumes and tuna could cause benign tumours

Mercury and other heavy metals in the environment could be the unrecognized cause of a range of women’s health problems.

Mercury—which comes from car exhaust fumes and industrial waste, and from regularly eating big fish such as tuna and swordfish—has already been linked to reproductive and developmental abnormalities.

But now researchers have discovered that it could also be responsible for uterine fibroids, benign tumours in the reproductive system.

Around 6 percent of women of childbearing age suffer from fibroids, and researchers from Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine have found a direct link to mercury.  They took blood samples from 4,501 American women, and the 12 percent that were suffering from uterine fibroids had much higher levels of mercury.

The researchers estimate that mercury increases the risk of fibroids by around 40 percent.

Other researchers say that cadmium, a toxic metal found in shellfish and organ meat, could be just as much the culprit as mercury.  Researchers from Boston University School of Public Health analysed blood samples from 1,693 black women, and although 1,132 of them didn’t have fibroids at the start of the study, 832—73 percent of the group—had vitamin D deficiency, and 10 percent went on to develop fibroids over the following 20 months.

Although an association between metals and fibroids was ‘weak’, the researchers said, there was a strong link to vitamin D deficiency, and although the problem is prevalent among black communities, it is also driven by high levels of cadmium and mercury in the blood.

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