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Traffic‐related air pollution and risk for leukaemia of an adult population
Author(s) -
RaaschouNielsen Ole,
Ketzel Matthias,
Harbo Poulsen Aslak,
Sørensen Mette
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
international journal of cancer
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.475
H-Index - 234
eISSN - 1097-0215
pISSN - 0020-7136
DOI - 10.1002/ijc.29867
Subject(s) - medicine , population , odds ratio , confidence interval , environmental health , demography , cancer registry , air pollution , biology , sociology , ecology
Air pollution causes lung cancer, but associations with other cancers have not been established. We investigated whether long‐term exposure to traffic‐related air pollution is associated with the risk of the general population for leukaemia. We identified 1,967 people in whom leukaemia was diagnosed in 1992–2010 from a nation‐wide cancer registry and selected 3,381 control people at random, matched on sex and year of birth, from the entire Danish population. Residential addresses since 1971 were traced in a population registry, and outdoor concentrations of NO x and NO 2 , as indicators of traffic‐related air pollution, were calculated at each address in a dispersion model. We used conditional logistic regression to estimate the risk for leukaemia after adjustment for income, educational level, cohabitation status and co‐morbidity. In linear analyses, we found odds ratios for acute myeloid leukaemia of 1.20 (95% confidence interval: 1.04–1.38) per 20 µg/m 3 increase in NO x and 1.31 (1.02–1.68) per 10 µg/m 3 increase in NO 2 , calculated as time‐weighted average exposure at all addresses since 1971. We found no association with chronic myeloid or lymphocytic leukaemia. This study indicates an association between long‐term exposure to traffic‐related air pollution and acute myeloid leukaemia in the general population, but not for other subtypes of leukaemia.