Exposure of human nasal epithelial cells to formaldehyde does not lead to DNA damage in lymphocytes after co-cultivation.

We performed in vitro co-cultivation experiments with primary human nasal epithelial cells (HNEC) and isolated lymphocytes to investigate whether reactive formaldehyde (FA) can be passed on from nasal epithelial cells (site of first contact) to lymphocytes located in close proximity and induce DNA damage in these cells. A modified comet assay was used as a sensitive method for the detection of FA-induced DNA-protein cross links (DPX) because DPX are the most relevant type of FA-induced DNA damage. Our results clearly indicate that co-cultivation of lymphocytes with HNEC exposed to FA for 1 h causes a concentration-related induction of DPX in lymphocytes when co-cultivation takes place in the exposure medium. However, when the exposure medium is changed after FA treatment of HNEC and before lymphocytes are added, no induction of DPX is measured in lymphocytes even after exposure of HNEC to high FA concentrations (300 microM) and extended co-cultivation (4 h). Direct measurement of FA in the cell culture medium by a sensitive fluorescent detection kit indicated that FA is actually not released even from highly exposed cells into the cell culture medium. These results suggest that FA that has entered nasal epithelial cells is not released and does not damage other cells in close proximity to the epithelial cells. If these results also apply to the in vivo situation, FA would only be genotoxic towards directly exposed cells (site of first contact) and there should be no significant delivery of inhaled FA to other cells and distant sites. Our results do not support a recently proposed hypothetic mechanism for FA-induced leukaemia by damaging circulating haematopoietic stem cells or haematopoietic progenitor cells in nasal passages, which then travel to the bone marrow and become initiated leukaemic stem cells.