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Workplace
Short Report
Cancer incidence in female laboratory employees: extended follow-up of a Swedish cohort study
  1. Per Gustavsson1,2,
  2. Tomas Andersson2,
  3. Annika Gustavsson2,
  4. Christina Reuterwall3
  1. 1 Unit of Occupational Medicine, Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Solnavägen 4, Sweden
  2. 2 Centre for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Stockholm County Council, Stockholm, Solnavägen 4, Sweden
  3. 3 Unit of Research, Education and Development, Östersund Hospital, Östersund, Sweden
  1. Correspondence to Professor Per Gustavsson, Unit of Occupational Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Solnavägen 4, 113 65, Stockholm, Sweden; per.gustavsson{at}ki.se

Abstract

Objectives Work in chemical laboratories is associated with exposure to chemicals, of which some are known or suspected carcinogens. A cohort study of laboratory workers in Stockholm followed until 1992 showed an excess of hematolymphatic malignancies in chemical laboratories and an excess of breast cancer among women working for more than 10 years in such laboratories. The follow-up of this cohort has now been extended by 20 years.

Methods The cohort comprised 2245 female laboratory workers who are employed for >1 year from 1950 to 1989. Information on employment periods and type of laboratory (‘chemical’ or ‘non-chemical’) was obtained from employee registers. Cancer diagnoses from 1958 to 2012 were obtained from the Swedish Cancer Registry.

Results There were 383 cases of cancer (SIR=0.93 (95% CI 0.84 to 1.02)). The risk of breast cancer was elevated, of borderline statistical significance, among those who had worked for at least 10 years in chemical laboratories (SIR=1.41 (95% CI 0.99 to 1.95) 36 cases). The breast cancer risk was especially high in women who had worked for more than 10 years in chemical labs before 1970 (SIR=3.76 (95% CI 1.72 to 7.14), nine cases). There was no excess of breast cancer in non-chemical labs (SIR=0.77 (95% CI 0.54 to 1.07), 35 cases). The number of hematolymphatic cancer was no longer significantly elevated.

Conclusions The increased risk of breast cancer, as well as the earlier noted excess of hematolymphatic malignancies, may be related to exposure to carcinogenic chemicals/organic solvents (eg, benzene) used in chemical laboratories, especially during earlier periods.

  • laboratory workers
  • breast cancer
  • chemicals

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/oemed-2016-104184

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors PG, the principal investigator of the study, and CR conceived and designed the study. TA and AG performed data matching and statistical analysis. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and revised and approved the manuscript.

    • Funding The study was financed by a grant from the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (FORTE), grant no. 2013-0402.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Ethics approval Regional Ethics Committee in Stockholm (2014/233-31/4).

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.