Urinary Phenylglyoxylic Acid Excretion after Exposure to Ethylbenzene among Solvent-exposed Chinese Workers.
Factory surveys were conducted in the second half of work weeks on 360 solvent workers (202 men and 158 women) and 281 controls in China. Monitoring personal exposures showed that ethylbenzene exposure was low (geometric mean 1.8 ppm) and was accompanied by coexposure to toluene (1.5 ppm) and three xylene isomers (6.7 ppm). Urine samples collected at the end of the eight-hour shift were analyzed for phenylglyoxylic and mandelic acids by high-pressure liquid chromatography at 257 nm. Despite the low level of the exposures, a significant correlation was observed between ethylbenzene exposure and urinary phenylglyoxylic acid, with high (0.6-0.7) correlation coefficients, suggesting that urinary phenylglyoxylic acid is a good marker of occupational exposure to ethylbenzene. Mandelic acid also correlated with ethylbenzene exposure, but with much smaller coefficients (0.2), possibly because the method employed was more sensitive to phenylglyoxylic acid than to mandelic acid.
Inoue
O
Department of Public Health, Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto 606-01, Japan.
Seiji
K
Kudo
S
Jin
C
Cai
SX
Liu
SJ
Watanabe
T
Nakatsuka
H
Ikeda
M