Impact of occupational pesticide exposure assessment method on risk estimates for prostate cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and Parkinson's disease: results of three meta-analyses.

Abstract

Assessment of occupational pesticide exposure in epidemiological studies of chronic diseases is challenging. Biomonitoring of current pesticide levels might not correlate with past exposure relevant to disease aetiology, and indirect methods often rely on workers' imperfect recall of exposures, or job titles. We investigated how the applied exposure assessment method influenced risk estimates for some chronic diseases. In three meta-analyses the influence of exposure assessment method type on the summary risk ratio (sRR) of prostate cancer (PC) (25 articles), non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) (29 articles) and Parkinson's disease (PD) (32 articles) was investigated. Exposure assessment method types analysed were: group-level assessments (eg, job titles), self-reported exposures, expert-level assessments (eg, job-exposure matrices) and biomonitoring (eg, blood, urine). Additionally, sRRs were estimated by study design, publication year period and geographic location where the study was conducted. Exposure assessment method types were not associated with statistically significant different sRRs across any of the health outcomes. Heterogeneity in results varied from high in cancer studies to moderate and low in PD studies. Overall, case-control designs showed significantly higher sRR estimates than prospective cohort designs. Later NHL publications showed significantly higher sRR estimates than earlier. For PC, studies from North America showed significantly higher sRR estimates than studies from Europe. We conclude that exposure assessment method applied in studies of occupational exposure to pesticides appears not to have a significant effect on risk estimates for PC, NHL and PD. In systematic reviews of chronic health effects of occupational exposure to pesticides, epidemiological study design, publication year and geographic location, should primarily be considered.

• Authors: Johan Ohlander, Samuel Fuhrimann, Ioannis Basinas, John W Cherrie, Karen S Galea, Andrew C Povey, Martie van Tongeren, Anne-Helen Harding, Kate Jones, Roel Vermeulen, Anke Huss, Hans Kromhout
• Journal: Occupational and environmental medicine (Occup Environ Med) Vol. 79 Issue 8 Pg. 566-574 (08 2022) ISSN: 1470-7926 [Electronic] England
• PMID: 35393289 (Publication Type: Journal Article, Review, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't)
• Copyright: © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.

Chemical References

• Pesticides

Topics

• Humans
• Lymphoma, Non-Hodgkin (chemically induced, epidemiology)
• Male
• Meta-Analysis as Topic
• Occupational Exposure (adverse effects, analysis)
• Parkinson Disease
• Pesticides (adverse effects, analysis)
• Prospective Studies
• Prostatic Neoplasms (chemically induced, epidemiology)