health risk assessment of heavy metals via the consumption of spaghetti

Background: it has long been recognized that the intake of foods contaminated with chemicals,especially heavy metals can give rise to acute intoxications. the toxic properties of heavymetals are due to their long biological half-lives, as well as non-biodegradable and persistentcomposition. considering the importance of the cereal products in the human diet, the presentinvestigation was carried out to assess the human health risk of residue levels of al, cr, pb, andzn in the domestic and imported spaghetti.methods: in this descriptive study, 18 samples of iranian and imported spaghetti were collectedfrom the market in kermanshah city, iran, in 2015. after the preparation and processing ofthe samples in the laboratory, the concentration of metals was determined using the inductivelycoupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy. then, statistical analyses were performed inspss (version 19) by running the shapiro-wilk test, one-way anova (duncan multiple rangetest), independent t-test , and pearson correlation coefficient.results: the results showed that the mean concentrations of al, cr, pb, and zn in iranianspaghetti samples were 655.56±400.35, 211.11±92.80, 2666.67±948.68, and 588.89±116.67 μg/kg, respectively and in the imported spaghetti samples, these values were 2022.22±1940.86,677.78±393.0, 3300.0±728.0, and 866.67±685.57 μg/kg, respectively. moreover, health riskindex (hri) values in adults and children via consumption of iranian and imported spaghettiwere within the safe limits (hri <1).conclusion: considering the serious contamination of some samples of iranian and importedspaghetti by al and pb, the control of heavy metals content during the whole productionprocessing of spaghetti is suggested.