Function of Serum Complement in Drinking Water Arsenic Toxicity.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Toxicology Volume 2012, Article ID 302817, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2012/302817 Research Article Function of Serum Complement in Drinking Water Arsenic Toxicity Laila N. Islam, M. Shamim Hasan Zahid, A. H. M. Nurun Nabi, and Mahmud Hossain Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Dhaka, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh Correspondence should be addressed to Laila N. Islam, lailanislam@ Received 14 October 2011; Revised 5 January 2012; Accepted 9 January 2012 Academic Editor: Ninoslav Djelic Copyright © 2012 Laila N. Islam et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Serum complement function was evaluated in 125 affected subjects suffering from drinking water arsenic toxicity. Their mean duration of exposure was 7.4 ± 5.3 yrs, and the levels of arsenic in drinking water and urine samples were 216 ± 211 and 223 ± 302 μg/L, respectively. The mean bactericidal activity of complement from the arsenic patients was 92% and that in the unexposed controls was 99% (P 0.01), but heat-inactivated serum showed slightly elevated activity than in controls. In patients, the mean complement C3 was 1.56 g/L, and C4 was 0.29 g/L compared to 1.68 g/L and 0.25 g/L, respectively, in the controls. The mean IgG in the arsenic patients was 24.3 g/L that was highly significantly elevated (P 0.001). Arsenic patients showed a significant direct correlation between C3 and bactericidal activity (P = 0.014). Elevated levels of C4 indicated underutilization and possibly impaired activity of the classical complement pathway. We conclude reduced function of serum complement in drinking water