Coffee farmers in the Philippines have had a tough time over the past few decades with the decline of coffee plantations across the archipelago. This has driven them oftentimes to sell their best beans and consume the damaged or scrapped ones.
I'm currently looking into studying the effects of this by analyzing the blood of renal disease-afflicted coffee farmers from different regions of the Philippines for Ochratoxin A, which is produced by Aspergillium and Penicillium species that grow on damaged coffee beans.
As far as my research has shown, the correlation between ochratoxin A and renal disease in humans or primates is yet to be studied. Any help finding pre-existing research regarding this topic would be much appreciated.
Your literature search has apparently failed to reveal Balkan endemic nephropathy in which Ochratoxin is thought to be the causative agent.
Check Petkova-Bocharova et al Food Additives and Contaminants 19, 282-301, 2002
A different but equally snarky answer is that while a lot of researchers cite Balkan endemic nephropathy to give relevance to OTA, the actual causal agent is likely aristolochic acid
Grollman, Arthur P et al. “Aristolochic acid and the etiology of endemic (Balkan) nephropathy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 104,29 (2007): 12129-34. doi:10.1073/pnas.0701248104
So no, I don't think there are any proper epidemiological studies for OTA, with the exception of additional plasma testing data from the paper below:
Studer-Rohr, I., Schlatter, J., & Dietrich, D. R. (2000). Kinetic parameters and intraindividual fluctuations of ochratoxin A plasma levels in humans. Archives of toxicology, 74(9), 499-510.
Look at Figure 4, and realize that OTA in human blood is highly variable both across people and time which makes it very difficult to determine if OTA even has an effect on humans at all.
So good luck, hopefully your data can shed more light on the situation.
Andrew Robinson Thank you so much for this, the articles were really helpful!
I Had no problem acessing the Petkova article
Article Balkan Endemic Nephropathy and associated Urinary tract tumo...
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