Hematological Alterations on Sub-acute Exposure to Flubendiamide in Sprague Dawley Rats

BACKGROUND: Pesticide poisoning is a common occurrence around the world. Pesticides can act on various body systems resulting in toxicity. Flubendiamide is a new generation pesticide, reported to have better activity against Lepidopteran insects. The present study was carried out with an objective to analyze the effects of flubendiamide sub-acute exposure on hematology of rats. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Male and female Sprague Dawley (SD) rats (9–11 weeks) were divided into five groups with six animals in each group. First group served as control, while the rest were exposed to ascending oral doses of flubendiamide (125, 250, 500 and 1000 mg/kg) for 28 days. After the trial period, blood was collected in heparinized vials and analyzed using Siemens ADVIA 2120(®) autoanalyzer. Various erythrocytic, platelet and leukocyte parameters were measured and analyzed using statistical tests by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-test using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS)(®) 20 software. RESULTS: After processing the data through statistical analysis, it was observed that the effect of flubendiamide exposure on female rats was negligible. The only significant change observed in the female rats was that in total erythrocytic count, while rest of the parameters showed non-significant bidirectional changes. In males, many parameters viz., total leukocyte count (TLC), total erythrocyte count (TEC), packed cell volume (PCV), mean corpuscular volume (MCV), platelet count (PC), mean platelet volume (MPV), platelet distribution width (PDW), hemoglobin distribution width (HDW), large platelets (LPT) and plateletcrit (PCT) expressed significant difference when compared to control. CONCLUSION: Many of the changes were dose independent, but sex specific. This lead to the hypothesis that saturation toxicokinetics might be one of the reasons for this varied response, which can only be evaluated after further testing.