Maternal Factors and Risk of Childhood Leukemia

Abstract

Background: Although the cause in most cases of childhood leukemia is not known, the contribution of environmental risk factors in the context of genetic predisposition has been reported with inconsistent results. The aim of this study was to examine association of childhood leukemia with maternal factors especially during pregnancy, to help in avoiding risk factors. Materials and Methods: This case-control study included children younger than 18 years diagnosed with leukemia from 2008 to 2012. Controls were randomly selected and individually matched to cases with respect to age, sex, and residency. All variables were compared between cases and control to determine any significant association with leukemia. Results: Statistically significant associations between risk of childhood leukemia with mother's education (p=0.001), occupation (p=0.0005) and pesticides exposure (p=0.005) during pregnancy were found. However, there were no significant links with maternal age (p=0.090), history of fetal loss (0.85), history of radiography during pregnancy (p=0.400), history of drug intake (p=0.689) and infection (p=0.696) during pregnancy. Conclusions: The results showed increased risk of leukemia in children whose mothers were working in agriculture and were exposed to pesticides during pregnancy. The further study needs to be investigated to know association of various maternal risk factors with leukemia which remained unknown in this study.

No Association between Traffic Density and Risk of Childhood Leukemia: a Meta-analysis

“…(Kumar et al, 2014). Several studies (Weng et al, 2008a;2008b;Vinceti et al, 2012) have reported that traffic-related air pollution may increase the risk of childhood leukemia due to benzene and nitrogen dioxide emissions.…”

“…However, a number of studies have identified lots of potential risk factors (Rajabli et al, 2013;Zheng et al, 2013;Kumar et al, 2014). Benzene exposure has previously been identified as one such factor that can increase the risk of adult leukemia.…”

Exposure of Larval Zebrafish to the Insecticide Propoxur Induced Developmental Delays that Correlate with Behavioral Abnormalities and Altered Expression of hspb9 and hspb11

“…Leukemia is one of the most prevalent pediatric cancers, and despite medical advancements, it continues to be a global burden [77,78]. The increasing global occurrence of leukemia is also tied to a large body of literature implicating increasing pesticide use as an addressable and preventable etiology [45,[78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86]. In our past study, prenatal exposure to propoxur was associated with detection of the leukemia-associated translocation t (8;21) in cord blood cells [87].…”

Increased Frequency of Micronuclei in Binucleated Lymphocytes among Occupationally Pesticide-exposed Populations: A Meta-analysis

“…Epidemiological studies have shown that there was an etiologic link between occupational exposure to pesticides and several human neoplastic diseases. In particular, a significant increase was observed in the incidence of multiple myeloma (Rusiecki et al, 2009), Hodgkin's lymphoma (Orsi et al, 2009), non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (Fritschi et al, 2005;Merhi et al, 2007;Balasubramaniam et al, 2013;Yildirim et al, 2013), soft tissue sarcoma (Hardell et al, 1995), and lung (Lee et al, 2004), pancreas (Andreotti et al, 2009), liver (Weichenthal et al, 2010), colon and rectum (Lee et al, 2007), leukemia (Van Maele-Fabry et al, 2007;Rajabli et al, 2013;Kumar et al, 2014), prostate (Alavanja et al, 2003;Van Maele-Fabry et al, 2006) and bladder cancer .…”