Systematic Evidence Mapping of Inhalation Exposure to Vanadium and Compounds (Presentation)
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Vanadium is a transition metal which occurs naturally in the earth’s crust and is a component of various minerals, tars, coal, and petroleum crude oils. The combustion of fossil fuels and the use of vanadium in industrial applications (e.g., steel production, vanadium redox-flow batteries, and catalytic converters) can contribute to the release of vanadium into the environment. The U.S. EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) undertook scoping and problem formulation for the inhalation exposure to vanadium and compounds, in response to a request by the Office of Air and Radiation. A systematic evidence map (SEM) was developed based on a broad draft Populations, Exposures, Comparators, and Outcomes (PECO) criteria to identify all the relevant human and animal health outcomes available in the literature. The Agency for Toxic Substances Disease Registry (ATSDR) 2012 Toxicological Profile for Vanadium was used as the starting point for the literature search. Literature updates were then conducted using PubMed, Toxline, and Web of Science databases to identify records published overlapping the date of search of the ATSDR document. In addition, relevant references were identified from previous, publicly available EPA documents on inhalation exposure to vanadium and compounds. Relevant keywords (like MESH terms) were used to sort all studies into human, animal, and in vitro evidence streams using SWIFT Review, a text mining work bench tool. The identified broad pool of studies was further title/abstract screened using DistillerSR software, followed by full text screening by two independent screeners. Further, studies meeting the PECO criteria including animal and human studies which underwent data extraction in DistillerSR and the results were visualized in Tableau. This SEM approach classified studies based on study design, study population, species, health outcomes, exposure to individual vanadium compound or to particulate matter (PM). Epidemiology studies mostly characterized exposure as total vanadium (as a component of PM or in a biological sample), while most animal studies evaluated inhalation exposure to vanadium pentoxide. Overall, we identified 114 epidemiology studies and 31 animal studies that were considered informative for further analysis.