DDE blood levels and health of a unique rural population of African American females residing in the Mississippi Delta of the United States of America

ABSTRACT

The Mississippi Delta has the USA’s highest rate of metabolic disease and experienced heavy DDT use. DDT’s persistent organic pollutant (POP) metabolite, DDE, is still in soil. Because epidemiology associated POP with T2D, we investigated serum DDE of African American females for association with metabolic disease. With informed consent, serum, blood, and demographics were collected during visits to a Belzoni, MS, clinic. Mean serum DDE was 1,649 ng/g lipid, almost twice the highest NHANES value. DDE increased (P = 0.00004) with age. The fasting blood glucose average of 129 mg/dL is diabetic. BMI increased with age (P = 0.0006) until age 50, then declined. Triglycerides increased as DDE rose to 3,000 ng/g lipid (P = 0.04), but then declined in subjects with higher levels (P = 0.03). Because DDE levels were only consistently associated with age, this study does not support a linear association between DDE exposure and metabolic disease.

KEYWORDS:

• African Americans
• DDT
• metabolic syndrome
• POP

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Center for Environmental Health Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS. The funding source had no role in study design; collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and/or in the decision to submit the article for publication.

We are grateful to Mr. Shane Bennett for his assistance with the difficult soil sampling. The authors would like to hereby declare that this work is a part of the results of the thesis of the first author, Dr Ward, supervised by Dr Chambers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Geolocation information

The study was conducted in the Center for Environmental Health Sciences, Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, 240 Wise Center Drive, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, Mississippi, USA (GPS Coordinates 33° 27' 57.132’’ N, 88°48' 36.8712’’ W).