Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons Case Study

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Introduction
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons exist around the human life, and they can be found almost in all nature resources that people need to use every day, such as air, water, soil and food. Some PAHs contains in products or goods such as gasoline, cigarettes, and cosmetics. (Yu, 2005, pp. 178-180) PAHs are common products of incomplete combustion. (Callesen et al., 2013) As a results, some nature incidents like forest fires and volcanic eruption may product PAHs as well as some human activities such as traffic exhaust, industrial emissions, cooking, and smoking. Respiration and ingestion are the common passageway for PAHs entering into human bodies (Yu, 2005, pp. 178-180). As a groups of chemicals with aromatic rings structures, PAHs
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However, in Al-Daghri et al., (2013) study, they show a directly positive relationship between asthma children and body PAHs level. Specifically, two group of children who are under 15 years old have been chosen in this study, which are non-asthma control group and asthma group. They were measured the content of 12 PAHs as biomarkers in blood test, and the results showed that all PAHs levels in asthma group are dramatically higher than the control group.(see table 1).
Table 1 Characterization of asthmatic children compared to non-asthma control subjects
Parameters Control Asthma P value
Age (years) 13.5± 4.2 13.7± 2.9 0.81
Naphthalene (ng/ml) 10.7± 2.7 26.2± 2.5 <0.001
Pyrene (ng/ml) 0.67± 0.34 1.1 ± 0.50 0.04
Flouranthene (ng/ml) 26.9± 3.2 31.8± 3.4 0.6
1,2-benzanthracene (ng/ml) 0.37± 0.24 0.73± 0.36 0.01
Chrysene (ng/ml) 0.87± 0.19 1.8 ± 0.13 0.001
Benzo(e)pyrene (ng/ml) 1.6 ± 0.17 2.6 ± 0.20 0.32
Benzoacephenanthrylene (ng/ml) 1.7 ± 0.23 7.0 ± 0.90 0.006
Benzo(a)pyrene (ng/ml) 2.1 ± 0.80 4.8 ± 0.93
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In the contrary, this study also mentioned other factors that might lead this results but did not measured in this study such as diet preferences, lifestyles and genetic factors which are factors also associated with asthma (Al-Daghri et al., 2015). This study might only illustrate the positive relationship between PAHs level and childhood asthma, but it cannot prove the health effects with PAHs and asthma in pathogenesis mechanism as this study did not analyze the distribution of PAHs resources and other factors which both positively impact with PAHs and asthma pathogenesis might cause the similar results. To be more details, hypothetically, there is a chemical X directly effecting children asthma, in the meanwhile, it also has a positive relationship with PAHs. For instance, they are both components of traffic pollutants that if children absorb more PAHs, they might absorb more X. In that situation, we also could measure the similar results as their research. According to Callesen et al., (2013), comparing to other indoor air factors, PAHs are hardly found association in the indoor dust with asthma children

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