Janis Campbell
University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, USA
Title: Air Pollution and Childhood Acute Leukemia in Oklahoma
Biography
Biography: Janis Campbell
Abstract
Despite numerous epidemiologic studies, the etiology of childhood cancer is still largely unknown. Benzene is a known carcinogen in adult acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In addition, ambient air pollution has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, but studies have not established whether air pollution is associated with childhood leukemia. The goal of this study was to determine if children with acute leukemia have higher odds of exposure to benzene compared controls, accounting for other sources of ambient pollution, specifically, traffic-related air pollution.
We conducted a case-control study matched on week of birth using the Oklahoma Central Cancer Registry as our source for acute leukemia cases diagnosed from 1997-2012 (n=307, including 79 AML and 228 acute lymphoid leukemia) and birth certificates to identify controls (n=1,022). Census tract-level benzene estimates were obtained from the 2005 National-Scale Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) and assigned using maternal residence at delivery. Ambient concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) were obtained as a marker of traffic-related air pollutants and estimated using a satellite-based land-use regression model. To determine if benzene, categorized by quartile, was associated with acute leukemia after adjustment for NO2 and other potential confounders, we used multivariable conditional logistic regression.