The objective of this study was to determine whether paternal occupational exposure to chlorophenol fungicides and their dioxin contaminants is associated with childhood cancer in the offspring of sawmill workers. We used data from 23,829 British Columbian sawmill workers employed for at least 1 continuous year between 1950 and 1985 in 11 sawmills that used chlorophenates. Probabilistic linkage of the sawmill worker cohort to the provincial marriage and birth files produced an offspring cohort of 19,674 children born at least 1 year after the initiation of employment in the period 1952-1988. We then linked the offspring cohort to the British Columbia Cancer Registry. We included all malignancies in cases younger than 20 years of age that appeared on the cancer registry between 1969 and 1993. We calculated standardized incidence ratios (SIRs) using the British Columbia population as a reference. A nested case-control analysis assessed the effects of paternal cumulative exposure and windows of exposure on the risk of developing cancer in the offspring. We identified 40 cases of cancer during 259,919 person-years of follow-up. The all-cancer SIR was 1.0 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.7-1.4]; the SIR for leukemia was 1.0 (CI, 0.5-1.8); and the SIR for brain cancer was 1.3 (CI, 0.6-2.5). The nested case-control analysis showed slightly increased risks in the highest categories of chlorophenol exposure, although none was statistically significant. Our analyses provide little evidence to support a relationship between the risk of childhood cancer and paternal occupational exposure to chlorophenate fungicides in British Columbian sawmills.
Our aim was to compare risk of lung cancer associated with smoking by gender and histologic type. A total of 30,874 subjects, 44% women, from three prospective population-based studies with initial examinations between 1964 and 1992 were followed until 1994 through the National Cancer Registry. There were 867 cases of lung cancer, 203 among women and 664 among men. Rates among female and male never-smokers were similar, although confidence intervals around rates were wide. Rate ratios (RRs) increased with number of pack-years for both men and women to a maximum of approximately 20 in inhaling smokers with more than 60 pack-years of tobacco exposure. RRs did not differ much between men and women: adjusted for pack-years, age, and study population, the ratio between female and male smokers' RRs of developing lung cancer was 0.8 (95% confidence interval = 0.3-2.1). All histologic types were associated with smoking, with the largest RR seen for squamous cell carcinoma and anaplastic carcinoma. This prospective population-based study does not confirm previous reports from case-control studies of a higher relative risk in women than in men for lung cancer associated with smoking.
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