Ann. occup. Hyg., Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 165-167, 2003
© 2003 British Occupational Hygiene Society
Published by Oxford University Press
Letters to the Editor |
Comment on Sartorelli et al. (1998): Invalid Calculation of Permeability Coefficients
Received 28 August 2002;
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Sartorelli et al. (1998) have presented a regression purporting to describe the dermal permeability coefficient, kp, as a function of aqueous solubility and octanol–water partition coefficient for a selected group of compounds. The kp values on which this regression is based were obtained in vitro using monkey skin. Compounds were applied in a small amount of acetone (30 µl on 1.77 cm2). A similar set of experiments was described in another paper (Sartorelli et al., 1999), which compared dermal penetration of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from acetone deposition and a lubricating oil.
The permeability coefficient for a chemical penetrating a membrane, kp, is defined as
kp = Jss/
C (1)
in which Jss, the steady-state flux, is expressed as mass of chemical penetrating per unit of area per