PUBLIC HEALTH20th Century Lead Exposure Damaged American Mental Health

Published 28 December 2024

In 1923, lead was first added to gasoline to help keep car engines healthy. However, automotive health came at the great expense of our own well-being. Exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood altered the balance of mental health in the U.S. population, making generations of Americans more depressed, anxious and inattentive or hyperactive.

In 1923, lead was first added to gasoline to help keep car engines healthy. However, automotive health came at the great expense of our own well-being.

A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood altered the balance of mental health in the U.S. population, making generations of Americans more depressed, anxious and inattentive or hyperactive. The research estimates that 151 million cases of psychiatric disorder over the past 75 years have resulted from American children’s exposure to lead.

The findings, from Aaron Reuben, a postdoctoral scholar in neuropsychology at Duke University, and colleagues at Florida State University, suggest that Americans born before 1996 experienced significantly higher rates of mental health problems as a result of lead, and likely experienced changes to their personalities that would have made them less successful and resilient in life.

Leaded gas for cars was banned in the U.S. in 1996, but the researchers say that anyone born before then, and especially during the peak of its use in the 1960s and 1970s, had concerningly high lead exposures as children.

The team’s paper was published Dec. 4 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Lead is neurotoxic and can erode brain cells and alter brain function after it enters the body. As such, there is no safe level of exposure at any point in life, health experts say. Young children are especially vulnerable to lead’s ability to impair brain development and alter brain health. Unfortunately, no matter what age, our brains are ill-equipped for keeping lead toxicity at bay.

Because water systems in older American cities still contain lead pipes, the EPA issued regulations in October that give cities 10 years to identify and replace lead plumbing, and $2.6 billion to get it done. Earlier this year the EPA also lowered the level of lead in soil that it considers to be potentially hazardous, resulting in an estimated 1 in 4 U.S. households having soil that may require cleanup.

“Humans are not adapted to be exposed to lead at the levels we have been exposed to over the past century,” Reuben said. “We have very few effective measures for dealing with lead once it is in the body, and many of us have been exposed to levels 1,000 to 10,000 times more than what is natural.”