Is there statistical evidence for a blood lead-blood pressure relationship?

In this paper we show that there is weak statistical evidence for a blood lead-blood pressure relationship in the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data. The significance and magnitude of this relationship for 40-59 year old white males as originally reported by Pirkle, Schwartz, Landis, and Harlan does not characterize other age and sex samples and is sensitive to the use of blood pressure data of questionable quality.