When a person eats, drinks, or breathes in any substance containing lead, they can potentially suffer from lead poisoning. You can inhale lead in the smallest doses, and even that can be sufficient to cause a lack of balance in the body. The result? Lead poisoning. A regular person won’t think much of their potential exposure to lead, but 853,000 deaths that occurred in 2013 were due to lead poisoning. If left untreated, this impairing condition may result in severe internal damage and even death. These are ten frequent symptoms of lead poisoning; knowing them will help determine whether an examination is needed.
Developmental Delay
While adults have a much higher natural resistance to lead, children are much more susceptible to having complications from exposure. One of the biggest setbacks a child can experience from lead poisoning is slower development. Good advice on how to keep your child’s development from being obstructed by lead poisoning: monitor their growth constantly. Once you notice an issue, especially if you know that there’s lead in the environment around you, you should get them examined.
Pregnancy Complications
Pregnant women with lead exposure in the past are at risk of losing their unborn child. They may also deliver it with extreme difficulty and long-lasting impairment. The problem with lead is that it doesn’t just move through the bloodstream, it piles up in the bones. Depending on the amount of lead within the mother’s body, the baby will consume lead with its nutrients. This can often prove fatal to a developing fetus.
Decreased IQ
Ingesting any amount of lead won’t even slightly decrease the IQ of an adult, but children under the age of six are at great risk. Most children that are exposed to lead during their growth have difficulties in school. The bones feed lead to the body. The lead then mixes with other ingredients that help create new neural pathways, resulting in stunted brain growth. More often, children faced with poor living conditions are in one way suffer from lead exposure. As a result, this undoubtedly affects their future.
Cardiovascular Diseases
When it comes to adults, exposure to high levels of led will lead to high blood pressure. This is caused by the invasive presence of lead within the bloodstream. In turn, this causes the blood to flow at abnormal speeds. Additionally, the heart congests with lead when the body is poisoned, and this does irreparable damage to the organ. This symptom can result in potentially fatal complications.
Reduced Focus
An adult brain experiences lead poisoning differently than a child’s. However, the speed at which the brain functions will definitely decrease. Reduced thinking and an impaired ability to use one’s brain can cause a loss of concentration. The adult will find focusing on their chores and obligations to be much harder, and this setback reduces the overall life quality by a large margin in the long run.
Anemia
As lead infects the bloodstream, it causes a lack of balance in the entire body, including red blood cells and hemoglobin. Anemia isn’t impairing by itself, but it’s often a symptom that leads to other complications. You can detect anemia by keeping track of your levels of fatigue, but nearly all of the symptoms tie back lead poisoning itself. In a way, anemia is the worst of almost all lead poisoning symptoms.
Encephalopathy
When an adult intakes an extremely high amount of lead, encephalopathy, the name for any brain disease, can occur. This is due to a variety of conditions. When it’s lead poison that causes it, it’s toxic-metabolic encephalopathy. Fortunately, a cure exists in the form of removing lead from the system. Encephalopathy is known to cause extreme confusion, seizures, and in extreme cases, a comatose state.
Infertility
Problems with the ability to conceive are another side effect of lead poisoning. Adults will begin experiencing lower libidos until they eventually take tests and find out they are unable to have children. Simply put, the lead that forces its way into all parts of the body has a toxic effect on the ovaries, womb, and testicles. Unfortunately, removing lead from the system will not correct this symptom.
Indigestion
As lead enters the stomach, it impairs the stomach’s primary function. This issue announces its presence with frequent stomach pain, diarrhea, and stomach ulcers. Lead in the body also causes vitamin deficiency, which can lead to indigestion. Acid reflux can also be a side-effect of lead poisoning focused in the gut.
Irritability
Irritability isn’t a direct result of lead poisoning. However, most of the symptoms from this list are present in lead poisoning (and at least 3 or 4 usually are). This can lead to an irritable nature in the patient. Also, the impairment of the brain caused by lead poisoning makes social situations and any sort of issue much harder to handle, resulting in unexpectedly rash and explosive reactions. Fortunately, this symptom and most others have a cure: simply undergoing lead poisoning treatment.