The investigation of potential adverse health effects of occupational exposures to ionizing radiation, on
uranium miners, is an important area of research.
Radon is a well-known
carcinogen for lung, but the link between radiation exposure and other diseases remains controversial, particularly for
kidney cancer. The aims of this study were therefore to perform external
kidney cancer mortality analyses and to assess the relationship between occupational radiation exposure and
kidney cancer mortality, using competing risks methodology, from two
uranium miners cohorts. The French (n = 3,377) and German (n = 58,986) cohorts of
uranium miners included 11 and 174 deaths from
kidney cancer. For each cohort, the excess of
kidney cancer mortality has been assessed by standardized mortality ratio (SMR) corrected for the probability of known causes of death. The associations between cumulative occupational radiation exposures (
radon, external gamma radiation and long-lived
radionuclides) or kidney equivalent doses and both the cause-specific hazard and the probability of occurrence of
kidney cancer death have been estimated with Cox and Fine and Gray models adjusted to date of birth and considering the attained age as the timescale. No significant excess of
kidney cancer mortality has been observed neither in the French cohort (SMR = 1.49, 95 % confidence interval [0.73; 2.67]) nor in the German cohort (SMR = 0.91 [0.77; 1.06]). Moreover, no significant association between
kidney cancer mortality and any type of occupational radiation exposure or kidney equivalent dose has been observed. Future analyses based on further follow-up updates and/or large pooled cohorts should allow us to confirm or not the absence of association.