REVIEW article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Occupational Health and Safety
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1566473
This article is part of the Research TopicMineral Particles and Fibers and Human Health Risks: State-of-the-Art in Characterization, Analysis, Tissue Analytics, Exposure Thresholds for Risk, Epidemiology, and Risk Assessment for Science-Based Regulation and Disease Prevention and Implications for Occupational Health and SafetyView all 11 articles
Cell Defense Mechanisms to Asbestos Fibers
Provisionally accepted
- 1GZA GeoEnvironmental, Boulder, United States
- 2University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, United States
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Although inhalation of sufficient doses and dimensions of airborne asbestos dusts in an occupational setting can produce cancer in the lungs, pleura and peritoneum, tumors occur in less than 5 to 10 percent of exposed individuals, even among persons with considerable historical exposures. In this perspective, we review cell defense mechanisms that are involved in protective and adaptive responses to asbestos exposure. These adaptive responses are orchestrated through a multifaceted cellular program involving the concerted action of diverse stress response pathways, including antioxidant responses, DNA repair mechanisms, molecular mechanisms for intracellular signaling leading to proliferation, apoptosis, and inflammation, and cell cycle regulation. These cell defenses suggest that humans can adjust to moderate levels of stress or change without experiencing negative effects, implying the existence of a threshold dose. Likewise, reported no-observed adverse-effect levels (NOAELs) for various asbestos fiber types and asbestos-related cancers in experimental and epidemiological data further support the existence of a threshold dose and are discussed here.
Keywords: Asbestos, Elongated Mineral Fibers (EMPs), Mesothelioma, lung cancer, threshold
Received: 24 Jan 2025; Accepted: 17 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Barlow and Mossman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Brooke T. Mossman, University of Vermont, Burlington, 05405, Vermont, United States
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