Effect Of Formaldehyde On Meidical Student's Neurobehavioral Functions And DNA-protein Crosslinks In Buccal Mucosa Cells

I. Object and methodTo study the changes of neurobehavioral function and the effect of exposure to formaldehyde on DNA–protein crosslinks (DPC) in buccal mucosa cells in students who were taking anatomy course. The 38 medical students who exposed to formaldehyde were selected as exposed group. The 40 students in natural science college were selected as control group. First formaldehyde-related symptoms of all the subjects were confirmed by a standardized questionnaire . Two groups were examined with the Computerized Neurobehavioral Evaluations System (Chinese version, NES-C3). The modified KCl-SDS precipitation assay published by Zhitkovich and Costa in 1992 was applied to detect DNA–protein crosslinks in human cells. And this method has been used to explore DPC induced by different pollutants in numerous studies.II.Result37 medical students (20 males and 17 females) aged 19.24±1.09 (mean±standard deviation) and 40 students (20 males and 20 females) in natural science college aged 19.55±0.99 (mean±standard deviation) were studied. The frequency of exposure to formaldehyde was 6 h per week in exposed group. Concentrations of formaldehyde in anatomy laboratory ranged from 0.42 to 1.57 mg/m3. We found from the questionnaire, the formaldehyde-exposed students'symptoms of irritation of eyes ,skin and neurasthenia occur more frequently than the control group .The formaldehyde-exposed students changed significantly comparing with the control in the indexes of mood , complex time testing (P<0.05).Exposure to formaldehyde resulted in an increase of DNA-protein crosslinks. The percentage (mean±standard deviation) of DNA-protein crosslinks in exposed and nonexposed students were 25.72±6.48% and 22.88±5.34% (p<0.05), respectively. Formaldehyde caused a significant increase in DNA–protein crosslinks of the females in two groups (27.72±5.76% and 22.29±4.20%, p<0.01). However, there was no difference in males (24.02±6.72 and 23.48±6.33, p>0.05).III. ConclusionOcular discomfort and so on was found in the anatomy course The emotion state, manual dexterity, attention and corresponsive velocity in the anatomy course formaldehyde-exposed students could be affected.The results suggest that exposure to formaldehyde in medical students...