DEVELOPMENT OF NEW VOLATILE ORGANIC-COMPOUND (VOC) EXPOSURE METRICS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO SICK BUILDING SYNDROME SYMPTOMS

Occupants of office buildings are exposed to low concentrations of com plex mixtures of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that encompass a nu mber of chemical classes and a broad range of irritancies. ''Sick buil ding syndrome'' (SBS) is suspected to be related to these exposures. U sing data from 22 office areas in 12 California buildings, seven VOC e xposure metrics were developed and their ability to predict self-repor ted SBS irritant symptoms of office workers was tested. The VOC metric s were each evaluated in a multivariate logistic regression analysis m odel adjusted for other risk factors or confounders. Total VOCs and mo st of the other metrics were not statistically significant predictors of symptoms in crude or adjusted analyses. Two metrics were developed using principal components (PC) analysis on subsets of the 39 VOCs. Th e irritancy/PC metric was the most statistically significant predictor of adjusted irritant symptoms. The irritant potencies of individual c ompounds, highly correlated nature of indoor VOC mixtures, and probabl e presence of potent, but unmeasured, VOCs were variously factored int o this metric. These results, which for the first time show a Link bet ween low level VOC exposures from specific types of indoor sources to SBS symptoms, require confirmation using data sets from other building s.