Assessment of the Concentration of 51 Elements in the Liver and in Various Parts of the Human Brain—Profiling of the Mineral Status

Abstract

The anthropogenic environment and diet introduce many metals into the human body, both essential and toxic. Absorption leads to systemic exposure and accumulation in body fluids and tissues. Both excess and deficiency of trace elements are health hazards. The primary aim of the present study was to evaluate the concentration of 51 elements in liver samples and 11 selected brain regions obtained at post-mortem examination from a population of adults living in south-eastern Poland (n = 15). A total of 180 analyses were performed by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry in two independent replicates. The collected data show very high individual variability in the content of the investigated elements. Macroelements such as sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, iron, and zinc occurred in the highest concentrations and with the greatest statistically significant variations. Although the elemental content of the brain and liver differed significantly, the strongest positive correlation between liver and polus frontalis was observed for the essential element selenium (0.9338) and the strongest negative one for manganese (−0.4316) and lanthanum (−0.5110). The brain areas studied have different requirements for phosphorus, manganese, iron, and molybdenum. In addition, males had a significantly (p < 0.05) higher brain content of lanthanides and actinides than females. The results of this study show that the inhabitants of south-eastern Poland are exposed to a fairly uniform accumulation of aluminum and vanadium in the brain, which have the highest affinity to the thalamus dorsalis. This result proves that there is environmental exposure to these elements.

Linking Metallic Micronutrients and Toxic Xenobiotics to Atherosclerosis and Fatty Liver Disease—Postmortem ICP-MS Analysis of Selected Human Tissues

“…The sample preparation procedure was the same as previously published [51][52][53]. In brief, 7 mL of 69% suprapur nitric acid HNO 3 (Baker, Radnor, PA, USA) was added to approximately 0.3-0.5 g of tissue sample, followed by heating to 190 • C in closed Teflon containers in the microwave mineralisation system Multiwave 5000 (Anton Paar, Graz, Austria).…”

Particulate matter constituents trigger the formation of extracellular amyloid β and Tau-containing plaques and neurite shorteningin vitro

“…Another group showed that titanium content in mouse hippocampus after 90 days of continuous intranasal exposure to TiO 2 nanoparticles was 0.6 mg/g tissue at the highest administered dose of 10 mg/kg body weight (Ze et al, 2014), much higher than the levels observed in humans. Titanium can be found in human tissue at lower average concentrations ranging from 1 μg/g (Peters et al, 2020) up to 80 μg/g (Baj et al, 2023) in the human brain. Thus, neuroinflammation and impairment of spatial memory observed in mice occur at more than ten times higher brain content than observed in humans.…”