The formation of SCEs as an effect of occupational exposure to formaldehyde

Abstract

Formaldehyde (FA) is a ubiquitous toxic chemical employed worldwide due to its disinfectant and preservative properties. Despite being classified as a human carcinogen, FA is still employed as formalin in pathology wards as standard fixative. We evaluated its relationship with the formation of sister-chromatid exchanges (SCEs) in cultured peripheral blood lymphocytes on 57 pathologists and 48 controls and the risk/protective role played by several genetic polymorphisms. All subjects were assessed for SCEs and genotyped for the most common cancer-associated gene polymorphisms: CYP1A1 exon 7 (A > G), CYP1A1*2A (T > C), CYP2C19*2 (G > A), GSTT1 (presence/absence), GSTM1 (presence/absence), GSTP1 (A > G), XRCC1 (G399A), XRCC1 (C194T), XRCC1 (A280G), XPC exon 15 (A939C), XPC exon 9 (C499T), TNFα − 308 G > A), IL10 − 1082 (G > A), and IL6 − 174 (G > C). Air-FA concentration was assessed through passive personal samplers. Pathologists, exposed to 55.2 μg/m3 of air-FA, showed a significantly higher SCEs frequency than controls, exposed, respectively, to 18.4 μg/m3. Air-FA was directly correlated with SCEs frequency and inversely with the replication index (RI). Regression models showed FA exposure as a significant predictor in developing SCEs, while did not highlight any role of the selected polymorphisms. Our study confirms the role of low air-FA levels as genotoxicity inductor, highlighting the importance to define exposure limits that could be safer for exposed workers.

Exposure and Early Effect Biomarkers for Risk Assessment of Occupational Exposure to Formaldehyde: A Systematic Review

“…The included articles were published between 1989 and 2023 and performed in several countries: 15 from Italy [14,15,21,22,26,28,29,[36][37][38]41,45,50,51,60], 7 from Portugal [17][18][19][20]24,25,63], and 5 from China [42,43,52,53,56]. Other countries were less represented: Egypt [35,40,58], Brazil [5,11,48], and Israel [30][31][32] had three studies each; Iran [54,55], USA [33,49], Hungary [23,34], Turkey [39,47], and Bulgaria [44,57] had two studies each; only one study was conducted each in Slovakia [62], Tunisia [16], Sweden…”

“…The most common investigated effect was the micronucleus frequency in peripheral blood lymphocytes and/or epithelial buccal cells (used in 14 [11,[16][17][18]20,24,25,28,33,39,46,48,58,63] of the 49 included studies evaluating biomarkers of effect), which was statistically significantly increased in those exposed compared to controls, with the exception of Pala et al [28], which did not find any cytogenetic effect. Nine studies analyzed structural chromosomal aberrations [19,21,23,[27][28][29]34,43,62] and nine articles evaluated sister chromatide exchanges [17,18,20,22,23,28,31,33,34]; they found significantly increased effects in the exposed workers compared to controls.…”