Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, International St. Mary's Hospital, Catholic Kwandong University, Korea.
Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute, Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, Korea.
Ind Health. 2018 Jul 27;56(4):346-355. doi: 10.2486/indhealth.2017-0225. Epub 2018 Apr 12.
Previous studies have shown that biomarkers of chemicals with long half-lives may be better surrogates of exposure for epidemiological analyses, leading to less attenuation of the exposure-disease association, than personal air samples. However, chemicals with short half-lives have shown inconsistent results. In the present study, we compared pairs of personal air benzene and its short-half-life urinary metabolite trans,trans-muconic acid (t,t-MA), and predicted attenuation bias of theoretical exposure-disease association. Total 669 pairs of personal air benzene and urine t,t-MA samples were taken from 474 male workers during turnaround maintenance operations held in seven petrochemical plants. Maintenance jobs were classified into 13 groups. Variance components were calculated for personal air benzene and urine t,t-MA separately to estimate the attenuation of the theoretical exposure-disease association. Personal air benzene and urine t,t-MA showed similar attenuation of the theoretical exposure-disease association. Analyses for repeated measurements showed similar results, while in analyses for values above the limits of detection (LODs), urine t,t-MA showed less attenuation of the theoretical exposure-disease association than personal air benzene. Our findings suggest that there may be no significant difference in attenuation bias when personal air benzene or urine t,t-MA is used as a surrogate for benzene exposure.
先前的研究表明，半衰期较长的化学物质的生物标志物可能比个人空气样本更能替代暴露情况进行流行病学分析，从而减少暴露与疾病关联的衰减。然而，半衰期较短的化学物质的结果并不一致。在本研究中，我们比较了个人空气苯及其短半衰期代谢产物反式，反式-黏糠酸（t，t-MA）的成对样本，并预测了理论暴露与疾病关联的衰减偏差。在 7 家石化厂的设备检修作业期间，从 474 名男性工人中采集了总共 669 对个人空气苯和尿液 t，t-MA 样本。检修作业被分为 13 组。分别计算个人空气苯和尿液 t，t-MA 的方差分量，以估计理论暴露与疾病关联的衰减。个人空气苯和尿液 t，t-MA 对理论暴露与疾病关联的衰减程度相似。重复测量的分析结果相似，而在超过检测限（LOD）值的分析中，尿液 t，t-MA 对理论暴露与疾病关联的衰减程度小于个人空气苯。我们的研究结果表明，使用个人空气苯或尿液 t，t-MA 作为苯暴露的替代物时，衰减偏差可能没有显著差异。
