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SURROGATE TISSUE ANALYSIS FOR MONITORING THE DEGREE AND IMPACT OF EXPOSURES IN AGRICULTURAL WORKERS
Citation:
Rockett, J C. SURROGATE TISSUE ANALYSIS FOR MONITORING THE DEGREE AND IMPACT OF EXPOSURES IN AGRICULTURAL WORKERS. , 2002.
Description:
Key words: Surrogate Tissue Analysis; Toxicology; Toxicogenomics
Abstract
Agricultural workers may be at elevated risk of developing occupationally related diseases because of the chronic use of pesticides and other toxic chemicals in their workplace. However, in most cases it is impractical to routinely monitor these workers for the multiple exposures and potential health effects which they face. This means that disease development as a result of such exposures, particularly those affecting internal organs or which occur over a period of months or even years, are likely to go unnoticed until manifestation of clinical symptoms. At this point, medical intervention becomes remedial or palliative rather than preventative. Since in any given agricultural area there may be a large variety of compounds and mixtures in use, some of which are persistent and bioaccumulative, it is a difficult proposition to monitor for the various possible exposures using current methods. Such assays usually only measure metabolites of single compounds, and are not useful for predicting disease development as individual differences in toxin metabolism mean exposure levels are not usually informative of clinical outcome. An emerging idea to overcome these problems is to use Surrogate Tissue Analysis (STA). The concept of STA is to use accessible (surrogate) tissue (e.g. blood) to monitor molecular events occurring in target tissues (e.g. reproductive organs). STA incorporates new ?omic? technologies, particularly toxicogenomics, to identify molecular changes in surrogate tissues which are both indicative of exposure to a specific chemical, and are early biomarkers of disease development and progression. This review discusses how STA is emerging into a distinct field of study, and examines some of practical issues, problems and potential that it holds.