Nested Case-control Study of Occupational Radiation Exposure and Breast and Esophagus Cancer Risk among Medical Diagnostic X Ray Workers in Jiangsu of China.

Fu-Ru Wang,Yu-Fei Liu,Ning-Le Yu,Tanmay Mahapatra,Sanchita Mahapatra,Wei-Ming Tang,Quan-Fu Sun,Xiao-San Xu,Qiao-Qiao Fang

doi:10.7314/apjcp.2015.16.11.4699

Abstract

Medical diagnostic X-ray workers are one occupational group that expose to the long-term low-dose external radiation over their working lifetime, and they may under risk of different cancers. This study aims to determine the relationship between the occupational X-ray radiation exposure and cancer risk among these workers in Jiangsu, China. We conducted Nested case-control study to investigate the occupational X-ray radiation exposure and cancer risk. Data were collected through self-administered questionnaire, which includes but not limits to demographic data, personal behaviors and family history of cancer. Retrospective dose reconstruction was conducted to estimate the cumulative doses of the x-ray workers. Inferential statistics, t-test and 2 tests were used to compare the differences between each group. We used the logistic regression model to calculate the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) of cancer by adjusting the age, gender. All 34 breast cancer cases and 45 esophageal cancer cases that detected in a cohort conducted among health workers between 1950~2011 were included in this presented study, and 158 cancer-free controls were selected by frequency-matched (1:2). Our study found that the occupational radiation exposure was associated with a significantly increased cancer risk compared with the control, especially in breast cancer and esophageal cancer (adjusted OR=2.90, 95% CI: 1.19-7.04 for breast cancer; OR=4.19, 95% CI: 1.87-9.38 for esophageal cancer, and OR=3.43, 95% CI: 1.92-6.12 for total cancer, respectively). The occupational X-ray radiation exposure was associated with increasing cancer risk, which indicates that proper intervention and prevention strategies may be needed in order to bring down the occupational cancer risk.

Highlights

The only confirmed fatal health hazards of human induced by low dose radiation is the ionizing radiation carcinogenesis (Charles, 2001)
Medical diagnostic X-ray workers are one occupational group that expose to the long-term low-dose external radiation over their working lifetime, and they may under risk of different cancers
Our study found that the occupational radiation exposure was associated with a significantly increased cancer risk compared with the control, especially in breast cancer and esophageal cancer

Summary

Introduction

The only confirmed fatal health hazards of human induced by low dose radiation is the ionizing radiation carcinogenesis (Charles, 2001). Research on the relationship between radiation and cancer has been the oncology, radiation biology, radiation protection and epidemiological research focus (Thompson et al, 1994; Sun et al, 1996; Yu et al, 2001; Wang et al, 2002). Number of animal studies confirmed that long-term low dose radiation exposure may induce tumorigenesis (Hattori et al, 1988; Yoshida et al, 1997; Nishimura et al, 1999; Saito et al, 2001). Epidemiological studies of radiation carciongenesis are important in order that people exposed to man-made sources radiation should be protected from its harmful effects, and human carcinogenic risk of radiation research mainly based on it

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