Effects of cadmium on children and adolescents development (systematic review)

Introduction. Cadmium is widespread in the environment as a result of industrial activity, the use of agrochemicals, smoking. Children and adolescents are an eco-sensitive group of the population, and indicators of their physical and mental development are highly informative indicators of environmental impact. The purpose of the review was to study the effects of cadmium on the physical and mental development in children and adolescents. Search and selection of sources. A search was conducted for literature that is freely available using the search engines PubMed, Science Direct and elibrary. The search was carried out by the keywords: “effects of cadmium on the physical and mental development of children”, as well as on their individual indicators. The initial search allowed identifying seven thousand eight hundred sixty one reports, after an independent evaluation by two experts, 24 full-text publications remained. The inclusion criteria were: original data on the effect of cadmium on the development indicators in children and adolescents at any route of its entry into the body, a mathematically proven link between the level of cadmium with development indicators, taking into account the possibility of data bias. Results. The analysis of the subject matter and design of publications allowed establishing a limited set of criteria for assessing the physical and mental development (there are no indicators of dental maturity, puberty of boys, speech development, playing activity). Most studies indicate the effect of intrauterine exposure to cadmium on the body weight in newborns. The negative effect of cadmium on intellectual development begins to be determined in the senior preschool and school age and is also found in most studies. Contradictory data were obtained for the remaining indicators. Most researchers have not received data on sex differences when exposed to cadmium. Conclusion. Additional comprehensive randomized multicentric studies of the physical and mental development of children under the influence of cadmium, conducted according to a single protocol, are needed.