As elevadas mudanças nas estruturas sociais e familiares, cada vez mais complexas, bem como a necessidade de novas práticas de inclusão social e de integração escolar vêm exigindo cada vez mais do professor. Essa realidade pode desenvolver estresse, ansiedade e até mesmo depressão nos docentes. É necessário alertar os educadores sobre os perigos que essas enfermidades podem apresentar, tanto na vida profissional quanto na vida pessoal, pois muitos desses profissionais são afastados justamente devido a essas doenças. Suspeita-se que indivíduos estressados estão mais propensos a desenvolver quadros depressivos, então este estudo verificou esta hipótese em professores da rede pública do sudoeste do Paraná. Foi realizado um estudo prospectivo, experimental e longitudinal, com o objetivo de detectar a percentagem de professores da rede pública que apresentam altos níveis de estresse e depressão e alertá-los sobre os problemas decorrentes destas patologias. Foram utilizados dois questionários validados de autopreenchimento para verificar a severidade de distúrbios psiquiátricos não psicóticos, relacionados ao estresse e depressão. Os escores obtidos a partir da somatória das questões respondidas pelos professores no questionário GHQ-12 e no Inventário de Beck foram analisados através dos testes de Kruskal-Wallis e quando possível por ANOVA de uma via, e foram considerados significantes quando o p < 0,05. Dos 106 professores participantes da pesquisa, 46,2% deles sofrem de algum nível de estresse psicossomático e 21,7% possuem características de depressão. Esses números demonstram a necessidade de uma maior visibilidade da questão e o auxílio a esses profissionais, procurando melhorar a qualidade de vida dessa categoria profissional.

Deleterious effects have been widely associated with chronic pesticide exposure, including cancer development. In spite of several known consequences that pesticides can trigger in the human body, few is known regarding its impact on breast cancer women that are chronically exposed to such substances during agricultural work lifelong. In this context, the present study performed a high-throughput toxicoproteomic study in association with a bioinformatics-based design to explore new putative processes and pathways deregulated by chronic pesticide exposure in breast cancer patients. To reach this goal, we analyzed comparatively non-depleted plasma samples from exposed (n = 130) and non-occupationally exposed (n = 112) women diagnosed with breast cancer by using a label-free proteomic tool. The list of proteins differentially expressed was explored by bioinformatics and the main pathways and processes further investigated. The toxicoproteomic study revealed that women exposed to pesticides exhibited mainly downregulated events, linked to immune response, coagulation and estrogen-mediated events in relation to the unexposed ones. Further investigation shown that the identified deregulated processes and pathways correlated with significant distinct levels tumor necrosis factor alpha and interleukin 1 beta in the blood, and specific clinicopathological characteristics pointed out by bioinformatics analysis as adipose-trophic levels, menopause and intratumoral clots formation. Altogether, these findings reinforce pesticides as downregulators of several biological process and highlight that these compounds can be linked to poor prognosis in breast cancer.

Breast cancer risk stratification is a strategy based using on clinical parameters to predict patients’ risk of recurrence or death, categorized as low, intermediate, or high risk. Both low and high risk are based on well-defined clinical parameters. However, the intermediate risk depends on more malleable parameters. It means an increased possibility for either suboptimal treatment, leading to disease recurrence, or systemic damage due to drug overload toxicity. Therefore, identifying new factors that help to characterize better the intermediate-risk stratification, such as environmental exposures, is necessary. For this purpose, we evaluated the impact of occupational exposure to pesticides on the systemic profile of cytokines (IL-12, IL-4, IL-17A, and TNF-α) and oxidative stress (hydroperoxides, total antioxidants, and nitric oxide metabolites), as well as TGF-β1, CTLA-4, CD8, and CD4 expression, investigated in tumor cells. Occupational exposure to pesticides decreased the levels of IL-12 and significantly increased the expression of TGF-β1 and CTLA-4 in the immune infiltrate. Nevertheless, we observed a decrease in CTLA-4 in tumor samples and CD8 in infiltrating cells of intermediate overweight or obese patients with at least one metastatic lymph node at the diagnosis. These findings indicate that occupational exposure to pesticides changes the molecular behavior of disease and should be considered for intermediate-risk stratification assessment in breast cancer patients.