Our work suggests that the risk of PD is increased in farmers exposed to pesticides on several French crops and livestock, and supports additional evidence of an association of PD with dithiocarbamate fungicides, rotenone and the herbicides diquat and paraquat.
Studies in farmers suggest a possible role of pesticides in the occurrence of Central Nervous System (CNS) tumors but scientific evidence is still insufficient. Using data from the French prospective agricultural cohort AGRICAN (Agriculture & Cancer), we investigated the associations between exposure of farmers and pesticide users to various kinds of crops and animal farming and the incidence of CNS tumors, overall and by subtypes. Over the 2005-2007, 181,842 participants completed the enrollment questionnaire that collected a complete job calendar with lifetime history of farming types. Associations were estimated using proportional hazards models with age as underlying timescale. During a 5.2 years average follow-up, 273 incident cases of CNS tumors occurred, including 126 gliomas and 87 meningiomas. Analyses showed several increased risks of CNS tumors in farmers, especially in pesticide users (hazard ratio = 1.96; 95% confidence interval: 1.11-3.47). Associations varied with tumor subtypes and kinds of crop and animal farming. The main increases in risk were observed for meningiomas in pig farmers and in farmers growing sunflowers, beets and potatoes and for gliomas in farmers growing grasslands. In most cases, more pronounced risk excesses were observed among pesticide applicators. Even if we cannot completely rule out the contribution of other factors, pesticide exposures could be of primary concern to explain these findings.
Our results suggest associations between lung cancer and several crop-related tasks, even if we cannot rule out some chance findings due to multiple comparisons.
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