Sensory irritation caused by two organic solvents-short-time single application and repeated occlusive test in stingers and non-stingers

Abstract

Cumene induced significantly stronger sensory irritation than octane in both the single and the repeated applications. Both substances induced less subjective irritation the more times the volunteers were exposed. The decline with time for cumene was statistically significant for the non-stingers but not for the stingers. However, no significant differences regarding the reaction intensities were detected in the direct comparisons of stingers and non-stingers. CONCLUSIONS. Further studies with larger sample sizes are needed to investigate a potential connection between the responsiveness to the sensory irritation caused by lipophilic irritants and lactic acid.

What Is Sensitive Skin? A Systematic Literature Review of Objective Measurements

“…A lower CAP at baseline predicted earlier onset of stinging and a weak correlation (Spearman's test: r = 0.307, p = 0.03), with a higher clinical stinging score identified [39]. On the other hand, other studies found no difference in CAP between stingers and nonstingers [40,50,51] or between subjects with sensitive and nonsensitive skin [20,48], either challenged or unchallenged [20,48,51]. The lower CAP is consistent with findings of a clinically dryer skin [15] and a lower facial ceramide content of the stratum corneum found in subjects with sensitive skin (p = 0.037) [38].…”

“…In the past, the enhancement of differences in skin reactions between stingers and nonstingers also failed [25,27]. In 2011, Schliemann et al [51] observed that after only 5 days stingers showed significantly higher skin irritation following repetitive cumene and octane application. However, differences in biophysical measurements do not ensure differences in skin sensitivity since these parameters have high interindividual variability in the general population.…”

“…In total, 11 studies focused on TEWL as a parameter of skin barrier function (table 1). Most studies observed higher TEWL in the unchallenged skin of subjects with sensitive skin compared to those with nonsensitive skin [20,41,48,49] and in stingers compared to nonstingers [39,40,41,50,51], while only 2 studies identified significantly higher TEWL in sensitive skin [40,41]. Moreover, higher TEWL at baseline seems to correlate with a stronger TEWL increase following provocation [40]: plastic occlusion resulted in a significantly longer evaporation half-life time in subjects with sensitive skin [49], and a trend to increased recovery time of TEWL following SLS stimulation was also observed [20].…”

“…A significantly lower CAP at facial areas in subjects with sensitive skin [37] and in stingers [40] and a nonsignificantly lower CAP at facial areas in subjects with sensitive skin were found [41]. Challenging the skin with octane or cumene, however, resulted in a significantly lower CAP in stingers compared to nonstingers [51]. A lower CAP at baseline predicted earlier onset of stinging and a weak correlation (Spearman's test: r = 0.307, p = 0.03), with a higher clinical stinging score identified [39].…”

“…Therefore, the assessment of erythema in skin irritation has been widely investigated, either by visual assessment [28,37,41,59,60] or by quantitative methods such as tristimulus reflectance colorimetry (a* value) [20,50,51,52], reflectance spectrophotometry (erythema index) [38,53,59] or laser Doppler flowmetry (cutaneous blood flow) [20,41,48,50,51,53,61]. Increased vascular reactivity has been emphasized in the literature as a key player in sensitive skin pathophysiology.…”