Evaluation of Systemic Genotoxic/Oxidative and Proinflammatory Effects in Workers of a Titanium Dioxide Production Plant

This study is aimed at evaluating whether the occupational exposure to TiO2 during the industrial production process is able to induce genotoxic, oxidative, and inflammatory effects on blood, biomonitoring the same workers that showed micronucleus induction in the exfoliated buccal cells, as previous published. The final aim was to find sensitive and suitable biomarkers to evaluate potential early toxicity of occupational exposure to TiO2. On the same 40 workers involved in the manufacture of TiO2 pigment, 5 office workers, and 18 controls previously studied, we used formamidopyrimidine glycosylase- (Fpg-) comet assay on lymphocytes to evaluate genotoxic/oxidative effects and detected cytokine (IL-6, IL-8, and TNFα) release by ELISA to evaluate proinflammation. Moreover, we studied the possible influence of single nucleotide polymorphisms of XRCC1 and hOGG1 DNA repair genes and of GST metabolism-related genes (GSTT1 and GSTM1) on the evaluated effects. We did not find statistically significant differences in the mean values of the analysed Fpg-comet assay parameters; only the percentage of DNA damaged cells appearing in the test as comets (% comets) resulted higher in the exposed workers compared to controls. Also, the data analysed taking into account the specific task (bagging, industrial cleaning, mobile operations, maintaining, and production) showed differences only for % comets which resulted higher in industrial cleaners compared to controls. We found variations of IL-6 and IL-8 levels in the exposed workers with concentrations that were lower for IL-6 and higher for IL-8 compared to the control group. XRCC1, hOGG1, and GSTT1 polymorphisms did not influence neither comet parameters nor cytokine release. These findings demonstrate that TiO2 production process is able to induce slight proinflammatory effects in terms of IL-8 increased release but not significant genotoxic/oxidative effects on lymphocytes, which do not seem to be a target of TiO2, prevalently inhalable particles, generated in the studied production site.