Prenatal and postnatal exposure to vanadium and the immune function of children

The immunotoxicity induced by vanadium exposure have been reported in some toxicology researches. However, evidence from population-based epidemiological studies was lacking.

This study was conducted to assess the associations between prenatal and postnatal exposure to vanadium and immune function of children. A total of 407 pre-school aged children were followed, whose peripheral blood was collected for T lymphocyte subsets and inflammatory cytokines analysis, as well as vanadium concentration measurement. Maternal urine samples were also collected to measure vanadium concentration. We used generalized linear models to evaluate the associations of maternal and children vanadium concentration with children's immune function. Stratification analysis was further conducted to explore the potential gender-specific effects.

The geometric means of vanadium concentration in maternal urine and children plasma were 0.85 and 1.12 μg/L, respectively. Maternal urinary vanadium was inversely associated with the percentage of CD3⁺CD4⁺ cells [-5.53 % (-10.38 %, -0.41 %)] and absolute counts of CD3⁺ cells [-2.43 % (-5.05 %, 0.25 %)], and we only observed significant negative associations in males when stratifying by fetal gender. Children plasma vanadium was also associated with reduced absolute counts of CD3⁺ cells [-5.25 % (-9.57 %, -0.73 %)], but gender-specific effects were not observed. No significant associations of vanadium exposure with cytokines were found.

Prenatal and postnatal exposure to vanadium had suppressive impacts on childhood cellular immune. Further studies are needed to confirm our findings.