Urinary mandelic acid and hemoglobin adducts in fiberglass-reinforced plastics workers exposed to styrene.

Albumin and hemoglobin adducts as biomarkers of exposure to styrene in fiberglass-reinforced-plastics workers

“…The large dierence in the two slopes (about 2 orders of magnitude) may at least in part re¯ect the lower anity of SO for valine as compared with cysteine reported by Hemminki [6]. Interestingly, these two studies involved the two most highly exposed cohorts of reinforced-plastics workers that have thus far been investigated [2,3,19,20,25], the exposure levels being 300 mg/m 3 in the study of Christakopoulos et al [3] and 100 mg/m 3 in ours. This opens the possibility that Hb adducts can be detected above background levels only among persons with very high-level exposure to styrene.…”

“…However, applications of these assays to styrene-exposed workers in the reinforced-plastics industry have produced inconsistent results [2,3,19,20,25]. Three of these studies employed a modi®cation of the Edman degradation to measure SO-adducts of the Nterminal valine residue of Hb [2,3,20]. One investigation failed to detect increased levels of adducts among 52 workers (average styrene exposure 31 mg/m 3 ) as compared with 24 controls [20]; another study reported a nonsigni®cant increase in adducts among 14 workers (average styrene exposure 74 mg/m 3 ) as compared with 8 controls [2]; and the third investigation showed a clear increase in adduct levels among 7 workers (300 mg/m 3 styrene exposure as based on levels of styrene glycol in blood and on MA excretion) as compared with 3 controls.…”

“…However, applications of these assays to styrene-exposed workers in the reinforced-plastics industry have produced inconsistent results [2,3,19,20,25]. Three of these studies employed a modi®cation of the Edman degradation to measure SO-adducts of the Nterminal valine residue of Hb [2,3,20].…”

“…Three of these studies employed a modi®cation of the Edman degradation to measure SO-adducts of the Nterminal valine residue of Hb [2,3,20]. One investigation failed to detect increased levels of adducts among 52 workers (average styrene exposure 31 mg/m 3 ) as compared with 24 controls [20]; another study reported a nonsigni®cant increase in adducts among 14 workers (average styrene exposure 74 mg/m 3 ) as compared with 8 controls [2]; and the third investigation showed a clear increase in adduct levels among 7 workers (300 mg/m 3 styrene exposure as based on levels of styrene glycol in blood and on MA excretion) as compared with 3 controls. The latter study also found large linear correlation coecients between adduct levels and (a) SO levels in blood (r 0X713), (b) styrene glycol concentrations in blood (r 0X937), and (c) urinary MA (r 0X924) [3].…”

Biomarker Research in Neurotoxicology: The Role of Mechanistic Studies to Bridge the Gap between the Laboratory and Epidemiological Investigations

“…However, styrene oxide is not considered an effective alkylator of hemoglobin compared to other toxicants such as ethylene oxide (128). Furthermore, the capacity of humans to form styrene oxide is much lower than rats or mice (117); thus, very low levels of styrene oxide (129) and styrene oxidehemoglobin adducts (125,126) are found in human blood.…”