The majority of epidemiological investigations on metal exposures and lipid metabolism employed crosssectional designs and focused on individual metal. We explored the associations between metal mixture exposures and longitudinal changes in lipid pro les and potential sexual heterogeneity. We recruited 250 men and 73 women, aged 40 years at baseline (2012), and followed them up in 2020, from the manganese-exposed workers healthy cohort. We detected metal concentrations of blood cells at baseline with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Lipid pro les were repeatedly measured over 8 years of follow-up. We performed sparse partial least squares (sPLS) model to evaluate multi-pollutant associations. Bayesian kernel machine regression was utilized for metal mixtures as well as evaluating their joint impacts on lipid changes. In sPLS models, positive association was found between manganese and change in total cholesterol (TC) (beta = 0.169), while negative association was observed between cobalt (beta = -0.134) and change in low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) (beta = -0.178) among overall participants, which were consistent in men. Furthermore, manganese was associated with increased risks of incident hyper-cholesterolemia or hyper-LDL cholesterolemia (odds ratio: 1.849 or 2.354). Interestingly, rubidium was positively associated with change in LDL-C (beta = 0.273) in women, while copper was negatively associated with change in TC (beta = -0.359) and LDL-C (beta = -0.267).Magnesium was negatively associated with change in TC (beta = -0.327). We did not observe the signi cantly cumulative effect of metal mixtures with lipid changes. In comparison to other metals, manganese had a more signi cant in uence in lipid changes (posterior inclusion probability = 0.559 for TC in men). Furthermore, male rats exposed to manganese (20mg/kg) had higher level of LDL-C in plasma and more apparent in ammatory in ltration, vacuolation of liver cells, nuclear pyknosis, fatty change than the controls. These ndings highlight the potential role of metal mixtures in lipid metabolism with sex-dependent heterogeneity. More researches are needed to explore the underlying mechanisms.
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