Jeffrey Bland and colleagues discuss persistent organic pollutants like PCBs and dioxin, which accumulate in body fat with half-lives of 10 years or more. They explore how these chemicals trigger oxidative stress and hormone disruption, and how the body attempts to clear them through glutathione conjugation and related detoxification enzymes.
Since the late 1970s.
Agent Orange.
On the order of 10 years or more.
Now, persistency in a chemical like this.
So we'll take pcb, poly. What is it? Polychlorinated biphenol or something. The abbreviations are easier to remember than.
The long words or organochlorine pesticides, which.
Have now all been banned since the late 1970s. And among this group also is dioxin. So this dioxin is the most famous of them and was used in Agent Orange to defoliate Vietnam, which is another unfortunate story.
In any case, these things enter into.
The body and then they sit there.
They're difficult to metabolize, they're difficult to clear, they probably cause oxidative stress, they.
Probably cause hormone disruption, but they just.
Sit there, especially in fat tissue. And their half life may be on.
The order of 10 years or more.
So Ducky had done independent reading about those things, and she thought that they.
Might somehow or other be connected to the DDT story.
So she's very good at going back.
To the basic biochemistry textbooks and trying.
To understand the way that things work far better than I am or will be. And so she drew a picture of.
Another action of gdt, and that is in forming conjugates of xenobiotics with glutathione.
It turns out that within the cell, in that particular reaction where you have some kind of a xenobiotic and glutathione.
You have glutathione S transferase, which is.
A really important constituent of this whole antioxidant system.
And GDT plays an important role, again, in disassembling the glutathione so that it can be conjugated with whatever xenobiotic it is. The xenobiotic conjugate then becomes water soluble.
And can be excreted in the urine.
Now, whether it would be the pops.
Themselves that would be so conjugated, which seems less likely, or they wouldn't be persistent, but. Or, say, the reactive oxygen species which.
Are developed because the pops are sitting there and the body's complaining about it.
And trying to react to.
Sort of doesn't matter. So we finally came to the theory.
After several years of working with this, that the GDT is actually working not.
Only as a marker of oxidative stress, but more specifically as a marker of.
The activity and the attempts of the body to clear some of these xenobio.
