Metabolic Studies on Acrylonitrile

Abstract

Acrylonitrile (AN) is a very reactive compound with a high annual production and extensive application in the chemical industry, especially in the manufacture of synthetic fibers and resins. Despite its large-scale use, few data have been available until very recently on its toxicologic and especially metabolic properties (cf. e.g., Lawton et al. 1943; Brieger et al. 1952; Ghiringhelli 1956; Paulet and Desnos 1961; Hashimoto and Kanai 1965; Czajkowska 1971; Hoffmann et al. 1975; Milvy and Wolff 1977; de Meester et al. 1978,1979). Several years ago a detailed and widespread study on the metabolism and mechanism of toxic action of AN was started in our laboratory (Gut et al. 1975,1976,1980;Kopecký et al. 1979, 1980a,b;Nerudová et al. 1978, 1980a,b). Some of our further results are presented in other papers published in this book (Černá et al.; Gut et al.; Holeček and Kopecký; Nerudová et al.). The aim of this paper is to present some of our results on the metabolic pathways of AN in the experiments with animals, especially rats. In spite of the known biotransformation of the part of the AN dose to cyanide (which is further metabolized to thiocyanate and eliminated in urine; Brieger et al. 1952; Gut et al. 1975), the individual steps of this transformation as well as the fate of the remaining portion of AN dose have not been clear. The results of our studies presented in this paper, in our opinion, answer both these questions.