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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Elspeth Hulse, Professor John SimpsonORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Copyright: © 2020 Hulse et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Organophosphorus (OP) insecticide self-poisoning causes over 100,000 global deaths annually. Around a third of patients are intubated and up to half of these can die. Post-mortem analysis of OP poisoned patients’ lungs reveals consolidation, edema and hemorrhage, suggesting that direct or indirect lung damage may contribute to mortality. The lung injury caused by these formulated agricultural preparations is poorly characterised in humans, and a valid histopathology scoring system is needed in a relevant animal model to further investigate the disease and potential treatments. We conducted two pilot studies in anesthetized minipigs, which are commonly used for toxicological studies. In the first, pigs were given 2.5 mL/kg of either OP (n = 4) or saline (n = 2) by gavage and compared with positive controls (iv oleic acid n = 2). The second study simulated ingestion followed by gastric content aspiration: mixtures of OP (n = 3) or saline (n = 2) (0.63–0.71mL/kg) were placed in the stomach, and then small volumes of the gastric content were placed in the lung. At post-mortem examination, lungs were removed and inflation-fixed with 10% neutral buffered formalin. Samples (n = 62) were taken from cranial and caudal regions of both lungs. Two experienced lung histopathologists separately scored these samples using 8 proposed features of damage and their scores related (Kendall rank order). Two elements had small and inconsistent scores. When these were removed, the correlation increased from 0.74 to 0.78. Eight months later, a subset of samples (n = 35) was re-scored using the modified system by one of the previous histopathologists, with a correlation of 0.88. We have developed a reproducible pulmonary histopathology scoring system for OP poisoning in pigs which will assist future toxicological research and improve understanding and treatment of human OP poisoning.
Author(s): Hulse EJ, Smith SH, Wallace WA, Dorward DA, Simpson AJ, Drummond G, Clutton RE, Eddleston M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: PLoS ONE
Year: 2020
Volume: 15
Issue: 10
Online publication date: 14/10/2020
Acceptance date: 28/09/2020
Date deposited: 24/12/2020
ISSN (electronic): 1932-6203
Publisher: Public Library of Science
URL: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240563
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240563
PubMed id: 33052985
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