Comment on “Association between Lifetime Exposure to Inorganic Arsenic in Drinking Water and Coronary Heart Disease in Colorado Residents”
Abstract
We thank Rylander for his interest in our article and for suggesting magnesium may confound the association we observed between inorganic arsenic in water and risk of coronary heart disease. We did not include measures of drinking water magnesium (or hardness) in our study. However, levels of calcium and magnesium reported for the Rio Grande aquifer (which served our study population in the San Luis Valley) indicate higher levels of hardness, with low variability in the San Luis Valley (Robson and Banta 1995). In contrast, the arsenic level in groundwater in the San Luis Valley water quality samples showed considerable variability of 0–95 µg/L.
The correlation between magnesium and arsenic is unknown for the San Luis Valley aquifer. However, in response to Rylander’s letter, we calculated a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.12 between arsenic and magnesium using arsenic data from Meliker et al. (2010) and unpublished magnesium data from a study in Michigan. We saw mean arsenic concentrations of 5.3, 0.6, and 6.5 µg/L for magnesium categories of 11 mg/L, respectively, with a total sample size of 1,500 water samples and at least 400 samples in each category. These estimates do not support the hypothesis that arsenic and magnesium are highly correlated in drinking water, hence reducing concerns about confounding between these two minerals. More importantly, given that low levels of magnesium (Rylander 1996) and conversely high levels of arsenic (Moon et al. 2013) are thought…
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