Air pollution and urinary thioether excretion in children of Barcelona

The polluted environment found in highly industrialized areas and in big cities contains a great quantity of electrophilic (EC) and proelectrophilic (PEC) compounds, which largely contribute to the development of several pathological processes in humans. EC and PEC can be coupled to the cysteine moiety of glutathione spontaneously or by the glutathione S-transferase system (GST), giving nontoxic metabolites that can be eliminated as urinary thioethers (UT). Therefore one approach to establishing the degree of impact of EC and PEC on the human body is the analysis of UT in the population living in polluted environments. The work presented here has been carried out in the city of Barcelona with a group of 50 children living in a polluted area, over a 12-mo period. Our results demonstrate that UT are significantly higher when the amounts of air pollutants (AP) increase; although the level of contamination never exceeded the established "safe limits," UT reached values similar to those found in people smoking more than 10 cigarettes/d. These results may contribute to establishing the maximal levels of contamination compatible with a healthy life, on the basis of patterns of true salubrity rather than on political and economic criteria.