Exposure to anesthetic gases among operating room personnel and risk of genotoxicity: A systematic review of the human biomonitoring studies

Background and objective: Anesthetic gases have been used for a long time. Adverse effects of anesthetic gases to occupationally exposed people have been well documented in the literature. Due to low solubility, these gases are rapidly eliminated from the human body. Nevertheless, neurotoxic, immunosuppressive, hepatotoxic and reproductive toxicological effects have been shown in many of the scientific works. However, there is no detailed systematic bio-monitoring review about genotoxicity risk among occupationally exposed people. We herein performed systematic review based on relevant studies.

Methods: This work reviews the published literature about the genotoxic effects of anesthetic gases among operating room personnel published between 1989 and September 2015. We performed a computerized search of articles on Pubmed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar.

Results: Analyzed works have shown us that chromosomal aberration, sister chromatid exchanges, micronucleus and comet assays were the most frequently used genotoxicity end-points. In almost all data, occupational exposure to anesthetic gases has been associated with statistically significant increase in genotoxic damage among operating room personnel.

Conclusion: Health care workers are exposed to wide variety of agents including biological, physical and chemical factors. Among them anesthetic gases seems to be deserve special attentions since their genotoxic, mutagenic activities. In addition, chronic exposure to all anesthetic gases instead of alone induces cumulative genotoxic effects.