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Analysis and Health Risk Assessment of Potentially Toxic Elements in Three Codonopsis Radix Varieties in China

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Abstract

As a valuable medicine food homology plant, Codonopsis Radix has been widely used in China. This study aimed to analyze the content of nine potentially toxic elements in three Codonopsis Radix varieties and evaluate their health risks to the human body. In this study, a total of 147 samples were collected from five provinces in China. The content of nine potentially toxic elements (Al, Mn, Cu, Cr, Ni, As, Pb, Cd, and Hg) were determined by ICP-MS. Results showed that the average contents of Al, Mn, Cu, Cr, Ni, Pb, As, Cd, and Hg were 486.81, 30.30, 5.59, 1.38, 1.24, 0.40, 0.20, 0.16, and 0.11 mg/kg, respectively. The Codonopsis tangshen Oliv. samples from Hubei showed the highest contents of eight elements (Al, Mn, Cr, Ni, Pb, As, Cd, and Hg) among three varieties, and the highest Cu level was found in Codonopsis pilosula (Franch.) Nannf. samples from Shanxi. The content of toxic elements in three Codonopsis Radix varieties showed significant differences (p < 0.05). LDA models facilitated the identification of three Codonopsis Radix varieties with a 91.2% classification score and 89.1% prediction score. Further, when Codonopsis Radix was used as food or medicine, both the hazard quotient values for single element and the hazard index values for nine elements (0.87 for food and 0.84 for medicine) were far below one. The carcinogenic risk values for Pb in Codonopsis Radix when used as food or medicine were 1.14 × 10–6 and 5.51 × 10–8; the values for As were 4.80 × 10–5 and 4.98 × 10–6, respectively. It indicated that under the current consumption of Codonopsis Radix, the non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic risks from these potentially toxic elements were acceptable for consumers.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code Availability

Not applicable.

Abbreviations

C. pilosula :

Codonopsis pilosula (Franch.) Nannf.

C. pilosula var. modesta :

Codonopsis pilosula Nannf. var. modesta (Nannf.) L.T.Shen

C. tangshen :

Codonopsis tangshen Oliv

TCM:

Traditional Chinese medicine

CR:

Carcinogenic risk

HQ:

Hazard quotient

HI:

Hazard index

ANOVA:

Analysis of variance

PCA:

Principal component analysis

LDA:

Linear discriminant analysis

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contribution of worker from the Lanzhou Institute for Food and Drug Control for their help during the experiments.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFC1706300, 2018YFC17063003), the Key Project of the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (lzujbky-2020-sp13, lzujbky-2020-sp25), the Key Research and Development Project of Gansu Province (20YF2FA019), the People’s Livelihood Special Project from Technical Innovation Guide Plan of Gansu Province (20CX4FK014), and the Talent Innovation and Entrepreneurship Project of Lanzhou (2020-RC-41).

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  1. Ruibin Bai and Yanping Wang contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Pharmacy, Lanzhou University, 199 Dong-gang Road West, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Ruibin Bai, Yanping Wang, Yajie Zhang, Yan Wang, Jiabing Han, Zixia Wang, Jing Zhou & Fangdi Hu

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  1. Ruibin Bai
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  2. Yanping Wang
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Contributions

Ruibin Bai: Conceptualization; Data curation; Methodology; Writing, original draft; Writing, review and editing. Yanping Wang: Investigation; Formal analysis; Writing, original draft. Yan Wang: Investigation; Resources. Yajie Zhang: Supervision; Resources. Jiabing Han: Methodology; Software. Jingzhou: Resources. Zixia Wang: Data curation. Fangdi Hu: Funding acquisition; Project administration; Resources; Formal analysis; Conceptualization; Writing, review and editing.

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Correspondence to Fangdi Hu.

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Bai, R., Wang, Y., Zhang, Y. et al. Analysis and Health Risk Assessment of Potentially Toxic Elements in Three Codonopsis Radix Varieties in China. Biol Trace Elem Res 200, 2475–2485 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12011-021-02806-y

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