Modeling the retention and clearance of manmade vitreous fibers in the rat lung.

A mathematical model describing the dissolution and disintegration of long fibers and the clearance of short fibers is developed. For short fiber clearance, the model is based on previous modeling of the retention and clearance of particles, and most model parameters are taken from that particulate model. In addition to modeling the disappearance of long fibers, the present study includes a quantitative measure of goodness of fit of the model to observed data. Data from chronic inhalation experiments with insulation glass wools (MMVF10 and MMVF11) and rockwool (MMVF21) were provided for this study. These data comprised lung burdens at 10 time points at each of 3 concentrations for each fiber in inhalation experiments lasting up to 104 wk. At the two higher concentrations, the model had to take into account the effects of lung burden on macrophage-mediated clearance. The modeling shows that the overload dependence appears remarkably similar to that for low-toxicity particles in that the critical volumetric lung burden is similar to that for low toxicity dust. The model describes overload as leading to alveolar sequestration of short fibers or particles, and the estimated rate of alveolar sequestration for MMVF10 was similar to that for particles, but the estimated rate was lower for the other two fibers. Two alternative hypotheses to describe the process of the disappearance of longer fibers were tested by assessing their effect on a quantitative measure of fit of model predictions to the lung-burden data. These tests indicated that (a) dissolution leading to disintegration of long fibers into shorter fibers gave a much better fit than the alternative assumption that dissolution would leave only nonfibrous residue and (b) the relative rates of disintegration of the fibers in the lung appear to be directly dependent on their rates of in vitro dissolution and their diameters.