Effect Of Atrazine Exposure On The Immunological Function In Developing SD Rats

In recent years, the issue that man-made chemicals in environment could affect the immune function of organisms and arouse many diseases has increasingly attracted the public attention. Among Endocrine Disruptors (EDs), the pesticide possesses the most proportion. The herbicide atrazine is a typical endocrine disrupting pesticide, it is widely used in all over the world, and brings huge damage to the ecological balance and human health. In this paper, the developing SD rat was adopted as test animal, and the effect of atrazine on immune system was studied by observing the index of thymus and spleen, the T lymphocyte transformation and the hemolysin in chronically oral exposure tests. The immunotoxic mechanism of atrazine was also primarily discussed.The result of experiment indicated that the low dose (25mg/kg) atrazine wouldn't obviously affect the immune organ's index and the cell-medicated immunoresponse of SD rat, but would make the humoral immunity level of female SD rat rise largely. The medium dose (125mg/kg) atrazine would make the male rat's thymus atrophy (P< 0.05) and make the cell-medicated and the humoral immunoresponses fall obviously (P<0.05 or P<0.01). The high dose (250mg/kg) atrazine would damage the immune system and its function of SD rat more seriously. In this group, the thymus of both male and female rat badly atrophied, and the thymus index of male rat fell more obviously (P < 0.01). The ability of the cell-medicated and the humoral immunoresponses of SD rat also fell worse. During the whole experiment, the male rat seemed to be more sensitive to the toxicity of atrazine than the female. The spleen index of each group also didn't fall a lot, what indicated that the atrazine would injure the thymus more than the spleen.In one word, atrazine has immunotoxicity in developing SD rat, its toxic effect will be more obviously with rise of the dose, and the male will be more sensitive to it than the female. Atrazine restrains the immunoability through injuring the thymus and reducing the level of the cell-medicated and the humoral immunoresponses, and leads to the incidence of diseases such as cancer rising largely.