Article Text

Download PDFPDF

0344 Ischaemic heart disease mortality, diesel exhaust, and respirable particulate matter exposure in the diesel exhaust in miners study (dems)
Free
  1. Sadie Costello1,
  2. Michael Attfield2,
  3. Jay Lubin3,
  4. Andreas Neophytou1,
  5. Aaron Blair3,
  6. Daniel Brown1,
  7. Patricia Stewart3,
  8. Roel Vermeulen3,4,
  9. Ellen Eisen1,
  10. Debra Silverman3
  1. 1Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
  2. 2Division of Respiratory Disease Studies, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Morgantown, WV, USA
  3. 3Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA
  4. 4Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Abstract

We examined the impact of exposure among non-metal miners to respirable elemental carbon (REC), a diesel exhaust surrogate, and respirable particulate matter from mine and ore dust (RPM), on ischaemic heart disease (IHD) mortality in the Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study (DEMS). DEMS was conducted by National Cancer Institute and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Among males at 8 US mines, we estimated IHD mortality hazard ratios (HR) for cumulative exposure and for average intensity to REC and RPM among the 10 070 miners hired since dieselization. In addition, we employed the parametric g-formula to assess the impact of hypothetical REC and RPM interventions on IHD mortality adjusting for time-varying employment status to address healthy worker survivor bias. The HR (95% confidence interval (CI)) for the highest category versus lowest category of exposure were 1.18 (0.56, 2.24) for cumulative REC, 1.25 (0.78, 2.01) for cumulative RPM, 0.75 (0.39, 1.44) for average REC, and 2.58 (1.26, 5.28) for average RPM. Using the parametric g-formula, we estimated the cumulative risk under a hypothetical intervention where annual average daily exposures to REC is set to 0 and a joint intervention consistent with REC and RPM exposure limits of 0 and 0.5 mg/m3 respectively. The ratios comparing the risk under the intervention on REC alone and for the joint intervention, each compared to the observed risk, were 0.86 (0.62, 1.17) and 0.84 (0.71, 0.98) respectively. Our study indicates that exposure to REC and PM may increase IHD mortality among workers in this cohort.

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.