Abstract
BackgroundChildhood cancer is the main cause of disease-related death in children in Spain. Although little is known about the etiology, environmental factors are potential explanations for a fraction of the cases. Previous studies have shown pesticides to be associated with childhood cancer. The difficulty of collecting personal environmental exposure data is an important limitation; this lack of information about pesticides motivates the development of new methods to subrogate this exposure. We developed a crop exposure index based on geographic information to study the relationship between exposure to different types of crops and risk of childhood tumors.MethodsWe conducted a population-based case–control study of childhood cancer covering 3350 cases and 20,365 controls in two Spanish regions. We used CORINE Land Cover to obtain data about agricultural land use. We created a 1 km buffer around every child and calculated the percentage of crop surface within the buffer (Global Crop Index) for total crops and for individual types of crops. We fitted mixed multiple unconditional logistic regression models by diagnostic group.ResultsWe found excess of risk among children living in the proximity of crops. For total crops our results showed excesses of risk for almost all diagnostic groups and increasing risk with increasing crop index value. Analyses by region and individual type of crop also showed excess of risk.ConclusionThe results suggest that living in the proximity of cultivated land could be a risk factor for several types of cancer in children.
Highlights
Childhood cancer is the main cause of disease-related death in children in Spain
Little is known about the etiology of childhood cancer, environmental factors are potential
The data used for the study were from children aged 0–14 with a diagnosed cancer such as leukemia, lymphomas (Hodgkin lymphoma: Hodgkin’s lymphoma (HL), and non-Hodgkin lymphoma: nonHodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL)), central nervous system neoplasms (CNS), neuroblastoma, retinoblastoma, renal tumors, hepatic tumors, malignant bone tumors, soft tissue and extra osseous sarcomas or germ cell tumors, groups I to X from the International Classification of Childhood Cancer, Third Edition (ICCC-3) [22]
Summary
Childhood cancer is the main cause of disease-related death in children in Spain. little is known about the etiology, environmental factors are potential explanations for a fraction of the cases. A number of studies have used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing technologies to aid in agricultural pesticide exposure research [13,14,15,16,17,18] Many of these methods incorporate spatial functions such as distance measurement, buffering, and overlay analysis. One of these studies showed a method to create historical crop maps using a GIS to determine whether crop maps are useful for predicting levels of crop herbicides in carpet dust samples from residences [16] Another study used these tools for assessing the association between different crop patterns around the mothers’ residences and the birth weight of babies [17]. These approximations on individual exposure to pesticides may have some limitations [19] but in many cases they are the only way to approach the problem and to highlight environmental hazards
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