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Record W4414300020 · doi:10.1016/j.envint.2025.109786

Lead exposure and antisocial behavior: A systematic review of human and animal evidence

2025· review· en· W4414300020 on OpenAlexaff
Rachel M. Shaffer, Laura M. Carlson, Kirstin Hester, Parker F. Duffney, Jenna E. Forsyth, Gregory L. Ferraro, Christine Till, Amanda Haddock, Jenna Strawbridge, Charles C. Lanfear, Zahra Gohari, Alexandra L. Lee, Howard Hu, Ellen Kirrane

Bibliographic record

VenueEnvironment International · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicHeavy Metal Exposure and Toxicity
Canadian institutionsYork University
FundersCenter for Public Health and Environmental AssessmentOak Ridge Institute for Science and EducationU.S. Environmental Protection AgencyU.S. Department of Energy
KeywordsLead exposureEpidemiologyAssociation (psychology)Causality (physics)Lead (geology)Human studies

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: Despite decades of research and interventions, lead (Pb) exposure remains a global public health concern. In addition to well-documented impacts on cognition, there is growing evidence of Pb's impacts on antisocial behaviors, including aggression, conduct or antisocial disorders, and violation of social norms. We conduct a systematic review on the association between Pb and antisocial behavior from human and animal data. METHODS: We followed our protocol with selected modifications for practicality. Peer-reviewed epidemiology and toxicology literature from PubMed, BIOSIS, and Web of Science were searched through June 2024 and screened for relevance, leveraging machine-learning. Details for each Population, Exposure, Comparator, Outcome (PECO)-relevant study were summarized. Studies were evaluated for potential bias and sensitivity according to predefined metrics through the Health Assessment Workspace Collaborative (HAWC) system. Evidence was synthesized by sub-outcome (human: aggression; antisocial diagnoses or domains; violation of social norms; animal: aggression; social behavior) and then integrated across evidence streams, based on approaches adapted from the U.S. EPA. RESULTS: More than 15,000 studies were identified. After screening and scoping refinements, 43 epidemiological and 37 animal studies were included for narrative review. In the epidemiological database, there was lack of comparability in outcome assessment methods, precluding quantitative meta-analysis. Human and animal evidence for impacts on aggression was slight. Human and animal evidence for impacts on antisocial-related disorders or domains and social behavior, respectively, was moderate. Human evidence for impacts on violation of social norms was moderate. CONCLUSIONS: From our updated review of epidemiological and toxicological data, we find that evidence indicates a likely causal association between Pb and antisocial behavior.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Systematic review · Consensus signal: Systematic review
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.054
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.041
GPT teacher head0.341
Teacher spread0.301 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designSystematic review
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueEnvironment InternationalSame topicHeavy Metal Exposure and ToxicityFrench-language works237,207