Bleomycin sensitivity test in the exposed and reference human populations

Sensitivity to bleomycin was investigated in lymphocytes collected from three groups of males: 30 occupationally exposed cokery workers, 38 environmentally exposed Silesian citizen and 35 rural inhabitants. The data were analyzed at both the individual and group levels. The first analysis has revealed a substantial interindividual variability in the level of generated breaks (breaks per cell, b/c). This variability was independent of the age of the donor, smoking habit and X-ray exposure as tested in the multiple regression model. The means per group for the occupationally and environmentally exposed persons were almost the same with the values of 0.674 and 0.639, respectively. These two groups differed significantly from the rural population (b/c=0.448, p<0.001 by MANOVA). The reproducibility of the assay was satisfying (p>0.49 by the Wilcoxon matched paired test) after omitting 7 out of 49 repeatedly sampled donors. Those persons exhibited extremely high b/c rates in the first sampling.