AAAR 31st Annual Conference
October 8-12, 2012
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
The Effect of the Dust Samples Collected From Moisture Damaged Schools on the Immunological Cells: Results of HITEA-Study
KATI HUTTUNEN, Martin Täubel, Juha Pekkanen, Anne Hyvärinen, Dick Heederik, Jan-Paul Zock, Maija-Riitta Hirvonen, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland
Abstract Number: 469 Working Group: The Indoor Microbiome
Abstract Exposure to moisture and mold damaged materials is known to cause adverse health effects ranging from unspecific symptoms to chronic respiratory diseases. The relative potential of a material or dust sample to cause immunotoxicity in experimental conditions can be studied with cell lines.
In this work we studied the in vitro -effects of dust samples collected from moisture damaged schools in three European countries. The effects of samples from moisture damaged schools were compared to the samples collected from reference schools. A mouse macrophage cell line was exposed for 24 hrs to the settled dust collected from Finnish, Dutch and Spanish schools. After the exposure, the concentrations of four inflammatory mediators: nitric oxide, tumour necrosis factor (TNF) alpha, interleukin (IL-) 6, macrophage inflammatory protein MIP) 2 were measured from the cell culture medium. In addition, the viability of the cells was assessed with propidium iodide (PI)-exclusion and (3-(4,5-Dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) -tests.
According to the preliminary results, the samples collected from the moisture damaged schools in the Netherlands and Spain induce stronger inflammatory response compared to samples of the reference schools, whereas the responses caused by the Finnish samples are overall lower and differences between schools are smaller.