Cedarwood Oil as a Substitute for Xylene in Histopathological Laboratories – A Systematic Review

Background: Xylene is an aromatic hydrocarbon that's extensively used as a deparaffinizing agent, and it's far extraordinarily biohazardous. It is proven to be the best chemical to be used in histopathological laboratories in spite of its carcinogenic potential.

Aim: The aim of this study is to do a systematic review on the efficacy of cedarwood oil as clearing agent and deparaffinizing agent alternative to xylene in histopathological laboratories.

Materials and Methods: The articles for this review were searched from PubMed, Google Scholar, Google search and manual search using the keywords cedarwood oil, natural substitute, natural alternative and xylene. The final of 3 articles were included in the review which compared the efficacy of cedarwood oil as a natural alternative with the gold standard xylene. Once the articles to be reviewed were finalized, data was collected, tabulated and was verified and interpreted.

Results: Three articles included in this review showed considerable and acceptable results with cedarwood oil as clearing and deparaffinizing agent.

Conclusion: Merits and demerits are equally found in both the reagents but compromising the time and cost in terms of cedarwood oil for health benefits hold good for the pathologists but bad for the patients. In case of xylene, compromising the health benefits of workers which results in quicker diagnosis hold good for the patients but not for the pathologists. Finally storage and disposal of these two reagents still remains questionable.