Health Eftects of Chemical Toxicants and Efiluents Decermination of Trace Metals in Human Tissues and Project Title: 14. Scope: Their Influence on Certain Diseases (Cont 'd.) RX-O1-04 In America cardiovascular diseases, cancer, neurological, pulmonary and mental diseases are becoming increasingly important as health problems. Specifically, hypertension involves all ages. At least 10% of adults have hypertension with the incidence progressively increasing in the Sth, 6th, and 7th decades of life up to 20-30%. Among American blacks the incidence is higher. The greatest importance of hypertension ultimately may prove to be its influence on atherosclerosis, the major scourge of Western adult males, and in recent years to an increasing degree in females. In America, the importance of hypertension has been overshadowed by the much higher death rate due to coronary artery disease from atherosclerosis. There is increasing recognition, however, of the fact that hypertension is one of the major risk factors in determining the frequency of clinical coronary artery disease. It is now apparent that approximately half of the patients with clinical coronary artery disease have had antecedent hypertension. The importance of understanding this interrelation, therefore, cannot be overestimated. It was reported some years ago that food containing a crude sea salt was more effective in inducing experimental hypertension in rats than the same food with an identical concentration of pure sodium chloride. Some experimental and epidemiological data have implicated cadmium as one of the trace metals that might be involved. There are, however, reports suggesting that industrial workers exposed to cadmium do not have a higher prevalence of hypertension than would be expected, but tissues have not been analyzed for cadmium. The interaction of hypertension and atherosclerosis is vicious. Itis known that vanadium inhibits cholesterol biosynthesis experimentally and . epidemiologic data suggested that workmen exposed industrially to vanadium had significantly lower mean serum cholesterol levels than that of controls. Manganese, in contrast to vanadium, stimulates cholesterol biosynthesis. It is of further interest that vanadium counteracts the stimulation of cholesterol biosynthesis induced by manganese and that manganese nullifies the depressant action of vanadium on cholesterol biosynthesis. In another research program, 06-03-01-b, hypertensive-prone and hypertensive-sensitive rats have been bred. Substrains of the resistant and sensitive strains of rats have been developed that are genetically predisposed to develop a low or high serum cholesterol on the same high fat cholesterol diet. The avail- ability of these four substrains allows the study of interactions of hype fash 15. inogenic and atherogenic influences in a far more conclusive €han heretofore possible. These studies cannot be performed elsee the strains of rats exist only at Brookhavan. Relationship to Other Projects: The Surfolk County Medical Examiner is interested in these studies and will cooperate in obtaining samples of tissue, In addition, Dr. Marvin Kuschner, Professor of Pathology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York is very much interested in atmospheric contamination (See Continuation Sheet) L'19294% RX-97