Assessment of Pediatric Cancer and Its Relationship to Environmental Contaminants: An Ecological Study in Idaho

Abstract

The primary aim of this study was to determine the degree to which a multivariable principal component model based on several potentially carcinogenic metals and pesticides could explain the county‐level pediatric cancer rates across Idaho. We contend that human exposure to environmental contaminants is one of the reasons for increased pediatric cancer incidence in the United States. Although several studies have been conducted to determine the relationship between environmental contaminants and carcinogenesis among children, research gaps exist in developing a meaningful association between them. For this study, pediatric cancer data was provided by the Cancer Data Registry of Idaho, concentrations of metals and metalloids in groundwater were collected from the Idaho Department of Water Resources, and pesticide use data were collected from the United States Geological Survey. Most environmental variables were significantly intercorrelated at an adjusted P‐value <0.01 (97 out of 153 comparisons). Hence, a principal component analysis was employed to summarize those variables to a smaller number of components. An environmental burden index (EBI) was constructed using these principal components, which categorized the environmental burden profiles of counties into low, medium, and high. EBI was significantly associated with pediatric cancer incidence (P‐value <0.05). The rate ratio of high EBI profile to low EBI profile for pediatric cancer incidence was estimated as 1.196, with lower and upper confidence intervals of 1.061 and 1.348, respectively. A model was also developed in the study using EBI to estimate the county‐level pediatric cancer incidence in Idaho (Nash‐Sutcliffe Efficiency = 0.97).

The US Geological Survey Plans to Severely Curtail the National Pesticide Synthesis Project

“…Among the pesticide types, fumigants were found to be significantly correlated with pediatric cancer incidence across the 11 Western states and the largest applied fumigant in the Western states, metam, was found to be significantly correlated with total cancer incidence as well. A parallel study (Joseph & Kolok, 2022), which featured the multivariate statistical technique of principal component analysis, found similar results for the state of Idaho, with pesticides again correlated with pediatric cancer incidence. Clearly, without data from the National Pesticide Synthesis Project, neither of these publications would have been possible.…”

Risk-based Mapping of Pesticide Usage and Social Vulnerability in the Contiguous United States

“…We normalized the factor scores to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. Later, these factors were summarized into a single PI by estimating the magnitude of the selected components [43]. The magnitude for each observation was calculated by taking the square root of the sum of squares of the ve component values, as shown here.…”

“…The US EPA reported the twenty-ve most frequently used conventional pesticide active ingredients in the agricultural market sector from 2008 to 2012 [4]. The environmental burden index (EBI) for Idaho was developed by Joseph et al using the 2017 USGS PSNP data and these twenty-ve most applied pesticides [4,43]. Nevertheless, that EBI was limited to Idaho, and the pesticide exposure lagged in timepoint; no clear selection criteria were developed to identify these most frequently applied pesticides throughout the contiguous United States.…”

Investigation of Relationships Between the Geospatial Distribution of Cancer Incidence and Estimated Pesticide Use in the U.S. West

“…Recent studies have highlighted the significance of shifting from a single environmental agent analysis toward the cumulative assessment of environmental agents and their association with cancer incidence (Joseph & Kolok, 2022; Lobdell et al., 2014; Messer et al., 2014; Scott et al., 2019). For instance, the concept of environmental burden index (Scott et al., 2019), which includes variables associated with poverty, income, food access, and race (Parrish, 2010), has demonstrated a relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and cancer incidence.…”