Pesticides Exposure in Relevance to Cancer Risk

Abstract

Pesticides are widely used throughout the world because of their benefits to maintain high agricultural products quality and quantity. There is growing epidemiological evidence that exposure of humans to pesticides correlate with an increased incidence of cancer. Agricultural health studies often established a positive correlation between occupational exposure to pesticides and different types of cancer; however data on non-occupational exposures are scarce to draw any conclusion. The frequency of cancer diagnosis has increased dramatically among adults population, and there are no studies addressing the impact of pesticides or their residues on cancer development among high risk groups of adults' population. Cancer is the second leading cause of chronic diseases-related death among adults, yet there is no enough information to link pesticides exposure and cancer incidence. The biological link between pesticides use and increasing cancer incidence needs to be addressed, in particular the biochemical and epigenetic modifications that might be associated with continuous pesticides exposure. Lack of evidence in this regard has promoted us to write this mini-review as an attempt to evaluate the mechanisms by which pesticides develop cancer, and we hypothesized that long-term exposure to pesticides induce cellular oxidative stress, epigenetic modifications, and alterations of DNA methylation in multiple human organ systems leading to cancer development among high risk groups.