High risk occupations for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in New Zealand: case–control study

Abstract

This study has confirmed that crop farmers and meat workers remain high risk occupations for NHL in New Zealand, and has identified several other occupations and industries of high NHL risk that merit further study.

Farming, growing up on a farm, and haematological cancer mortality

“…This finding was present for the three main types of crop farmers (field crop and vegetable growers, fruit growers, and gardeners and nursery growers) and consistent with previous studies conducted in New Zealand for NHL19 20 and leukaemia21 that showed increased risks for crop farming but not for livestock farming using more elaborate study designs and more complete occupational information than was available for this study. In this study an increased risk for crop farmers was only present for males and not for the relatively small number (0.5%) of females for whom a usual occupation as a crop farmer was reported.…”

Occupational exposure to gasoline and the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma: A review and meta-analysis of the literature

“…Risk estimates for men were included since they were probably more likely than women to be employed in tasks where exposure would have occurred, although some only reported risks for both sexes combined [24,25,31,35,36,38,40,43]. Twenty-two studies were cohorts (pooled risk estimate 0.97, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.88-1.06, I 2 = 18%) [7-9,11,12,16-32] and thirteen were case-control studies (pooled risk estimate 1.21, 95% CI 1.02-1.45, I 2 = 20%) [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45].…”

“…Most were conducted in North America [7][8][9]11,[17][18][19][20][21]23,24,[28][29][30]32,33,37,39,40,42,44]; six in Scandinavia [25][26][27]36,38,41] and Europe [16,22,31,35,43,45]; and two in Australia/New Zealand [12,34]. Around half of the studies were interested in NHL incidence as the outcome [12,16,18,[25][26][27][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]…”

“…Some reported risks for motor mechanics [34,36,41] or filling station attendants [27,31,36], while the remainder only asked subjects whether they were exposed to gasoline at work [33,35,[38][39][40]. Fig.…”

“…O/E: observed/expected; Exp/Unexp: exposed/unexposed; CI: confidence interval; NR: not reported. Risk estimates are standardized incidence [12,16,18,[25][26][27] or mortality ratios [7][8][9]11,17,[19][20][21][22][23][24][28][29][30][31][32] for cohort studies and odds ratios for case-control studies [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45].…”