Brazil is among the biggest pesticide consumers in the world, with its population severely exposed to tons of such substances, both because of environmental contamination and occupational use. The health consequences of pesticide exposure are well-documented, but still sparse regarding Brazilian population. This study systematically reviewed the Brazilian studies published that address the relationship between exposure to pesticides and health problems in the Brazilian population. Also, information about pesticide use in Brazil is provided. The included studies showed that exposure to pesticides has a relevant impact on the health of the Brazilian population, regardless of age and gender, and on workers in rural areas or not. Most poisoning events seem to result from the continuous use of pesticides, whether occupationally or environmentally, characterizing a public health problem. The major consequences reported in literature were damage to the central nervous system, cancer, deleterious effects on rural workers' health, intoxications, malformations, and endocrine changes. These findings point out the need to understand the impact of chronic exposure to pesticides on severely exposed people and highlight the importance of creating public policies to protect them and avoid disease occurrence.

Deleterious effects have been widely associated with chronic pesticide exposure, including cancer development. In spite of several known consequences that pesticides can trigger in the human body, few is known regarding its impact on breast cancer women that are chronically exposed to such substances during agricultural work lifelong. In this context, the present study performed a high-throughput toxicoproteomic study in association with a bioinformatics-based design to explore new putative processes and pathways deregulated by chronic pesticide exposure in breast cancer patients. To reach this goal, we analyzed comparatively non-depleted plasma samples from exposed (n = 130) and non-occupationally exposed (n = 112) women diagnosed with breast cancer by using a label-free proteomic tool. The list of proteins differentially expressed was explored by bioinformatics and the main pathways and processes further investigated. The toxicoproteomic study revealed that women exposed to pesticides exhibited mainly downregulated events, linked to immune response, coagulation and estrogen-mediated events in relation to the unexposed ones. Further investigation shown that the identified deregulated processes and pathways correlated with significant distinct levels tumor necrosis factor alpha and interleukin 1 beta in the blood, and specific clinicopathological characteristics pointed out by bioinformatics analysis as adipose-trophic levels, menopause and intratumoral clots formation. Altogether, these findings reinforce pesticides as downregulators of several biological process and highlight that these compounds can be linked to poor prognosis in breast cancer.

Objective: To characterize the profile of occupational exposure to pesticides and its impact on women's health. Method: This is a prospective and descriptive study with a quantitative approach. The study population included all patients attended at Francisco Beltrao Cancer Hospital (Ceonc) from May 2015 to December 2018 (n=315). The characterization of their exposure profile was obtained through an interview using a form applied by trained researchers contained 60 questions related to women's pesticide exposure and their health status. The questions referred to past and current occupational pesticide exposure profile, intoxication, and health history from women and their families. All collected data were analyzed in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences package (SPSS 25.0). Results: A total of 265 individuals (84.2%) have lived some part of their life in the countryside, and 70% were categorized as occupationally exposed to pesticides. Most of them (57%) were directly exposed, mainly by washing pesticide-contaminated clothes and personal protective equipment used in pesticide pulverization without glove protection. Cancer cases in the family were the main disease reported (68.3%). Further, 57% of interviewed women had a breast cancer diagnosis but no significance between breast cancer occurrence and pesticide exposure was observed. Conclusion: The form allowed us to characterize the profile of occupational pesticide exposition in rural women, alerting them to their severe contamination. This approach can be useful to characterize the occupational exposure profiles of rural workers living in other rural regions of Brazil that use pesticides.

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Herein, we evaluated the salivary and plasmatic levels of tumor necrosis factor‐alpha (TNF‐α) in women diagnosed with breast cancer (BC; n = 20) versus women with benign breast conditions (Control; n = 29) and correlated the TNF‐α findings with BC clinicopathological parameters. TNF‐α was higher in the saliva samples from both groups than in plasma levels. BC and Control patients presented similar plasmatic and salivary values of TNF‐α. The salivary and plasmatic values of TNF‐α did not correlate with tumor features (estrogen receptor; progestogen receptor; Ki67, and HER2), indicating that its salivary content does not correlate with the parameters of disease prognosis. Therefore, TNF‐α is not helpful as a salivary marker in breast cancer patients.

Metastasis is the leading cause of cancer death. Considering that lymph nodes are the major pathway for cancer spreading and that the metastatic process is under oxidative stress effects, this study aims to evaluate the differential lipid peroxidation profile in the blood of breast cancer patients regarding their lymph nodal status (LN). A total of 105 women diagnosed with breast cancer were included before chemotherapy started. LN was determined by assessing the histopathological analysis of patients’ biopsies, and groups were categorized according to the presence (LN+, n = 48) or absence (LN−, n = 57) of metastases. Lipid peroxidation profiles (LPO) were determined in blood by high-sensitivity chemiluminescence. After patients’ categorization in groups according to their clinicopathological features, LN− patients aged over 50 years presented significantly lower LPO when compared to those under 50 years. Further, LN− patients carrying HER2 positive tumors presented augmented LPO when compared to patients bearing luminal B or triple-negative tumors. LN+ group also had reduced LPO when presented intratumoral clots. The significant contribution of this study was to show that LPO correlates with specific clinical features of patients with breast cancer according to their LN status and that such profile is significantly affected by the presence of metastases.