Environmental and Occupational DisordersTime course of onset of sensitization to common and occupational inhalants in apprentices☆
Section snippets
Subjects
A cohort of 769 apprentices (417 in animal-health technology, 230 in pastry making, and 122 in dental-hygiene technology) was constituted by recruiting students from teaching institutions in Quebec, Canada, in a process described elsewhere.4 The subjects were recruited on entering their training programs and considered eligible if they had not been exposed to the relevant work-related allergen for 3 months or more in the course of an apprenticeship. Those in animal-health technology were
Results
Among the 769 subjects included in this study, 698 participated in at least one of the follow-up visits; 690 had interpretable skin test results and have been included in the analysis. There were 394 subjects in the animal-health program, 186 in the pastry-making program, and 110 in the dental-hygiene program. The numbers and characteristics of the participants present during follow-up visits have been described in a previous publication.7 Briefly, 85% of subjects were female, 55.2% were
Discussion
The parallel time course of sensitization to common inhalants and occupational high-molecular-weight agents in exposed apprentices has not, to our knowledge, been described. We found the following over the maximum 44-month observation period: (1) once sensitization to an occupational high-molecular-weight agent occurs, there was often incident sensitization to common allergens as well (33/83 [39.8%] subjects); (2) incident sensitization to common and occupational inhalants was most often
Acknowledgements
We thank Michèle Magnan, RN, who worked on the recruitment of subjects, and Jocelyne L’Archevêque, RT, who was involved in the database management. We also thank Lori Schubert, who revised the manuscript.
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Reprint requests: Denyse Gautrin, PhD, Department of Chest Medicine, Sacré-Coeur Hospital, 5400 Gouin Blvd West, Montreal, Canada H4J 1C5.