Journal of Health and Safety at Work

Introduction: Manual dexterity impairment due to wearing latex and nitrile gloves among health care employees and laboratory personnel can be a remarkable problem because of its adverse outcomes. The present study was conducted to “compare the effect of using latex and nitrile laboratory gloves on hand dexterity”.

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Material and Method: In a semi experimental study design, 30 university were students randomly selected from Urmia University of medical sciences. Subjects assigned in three experimental conditions, such as the control condition (without gloves), with latex glove and with nitrile gloves. Then, dexterity level of fine finger and gross of the subjects were calculated using the Purdue pegboard test. Repeated measures one-way ANOVA test and T-test and Pearson’s correlation coefficient were used for statistical analysis.

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Results: The result showed that the differences between three groups of laboratory conditions from the level of gross and fine finger dexterity were statistically significant (p‹0.05). As the latex gloves showed significant and positive effect on gross and fine finger dexterity comparable with nitrile gloves and control group but there was no significant difference between the gross and fine finger dexterity of nitrile gloves when comparing with the control group. In other words, the nitrile gloves had not negative effect on gross and fine finger dexterity.

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Conclusion: Considering that there was no significant difference in the score of both fine finger and gross hand dexterity while using nitrile gloves as compared to the control condition (without gloves), means that use of nitrile gloves has no adverse effect on hand dexterity therefore, using nitrile gloves is recommended as a alternative for the latex gloves, considering the additional advantage of no allergic reaction in this gloves.