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The cancer is called retinoblastoma, because it starts in the
retina, the back part of the eye. Retinoblastoma accounts for about
6 percent of cancers in children under the age of 5 and about 3
percent of cancers in children under age 15.
“Retinoblastoma is an embryonal tumor, meaning that it arises from
tissues of the embryo,” Julia Heck from the Fielding School of
Public Health at UCLA told Reuters Health via email. “Six to ten
percent of retinoblastoma is ‘familial’ where the child inherits a
mutated gene from a parent. The remainder is ‘sporadic’ meaning that
these are new mutations that occur in a child's eye cell, which end
up causing the cancer.”
The risk of developing “sporadic” retinoblastoma increased
substantially when fathers and mothers were exposed to workplace
chemicals such as paints, pesticides, and metals, Heck and her
colleagues found.
The research team studied 282 children with sporadic retinoblastoma,
plus 155 of the children’s healthy friends, as well as all the
parents.
Fathers were asked to report all jobs held in the ten years prior to
conception. Mothers reported jobs held the month prior to conception
in addition to any jobs they had while pregnant. The researchers
then assigned an overall “exposure” score to each job with regards
to nine hazardous agents.
Results showed that children of fathers who were exposed to
workplace paint in the past ten years were more than eight times
more likely to have retinoblastoma than children whose fathers were
not exposed. Fathers who were at least 30 years old when they were
exposed to at least one of the nine agents had a nearly seven times
higher risk of having a child diagnosed with retinoblastoma.
Mothers’ exposure to at least one of the nine hazardous agents in
the month prior to conception or during pregnancy was associated
with more than five times higher odds that their child would have
retinoblastoma.
The research was done by the Children’s Oncology Group, a National
Cancer Institute-backed coalition devoted exclusively to researching
and understanding cancers in youngsters. The entire report can be
found online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
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Exposure to chemical agents including welding fumes, sulfur
dioxides, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons is rampant among
workers in agriculture, coal mining, and aluminum reduction. These
agents have previously been associated with an increased risk of
childhood brain cancers and leukemia.
Although the most common eye cancer in children, retinoblastoma is
very rare, with just one in every 200,000 births.
“Only 200 to 300 children are diagnosed each year in the U.S.,”
Greta Bunin from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who worked on
the study, told Reuters by email.
Nonetheless, couples actively trying to conceive should be aware of
the potential connection and, if possible, ask for a temporary
reassignment from employers to avoid further exposure, at least in
the short-term.
What measures should be taken from an occupational or environmental
policy standpoint to lessen the risks? From a policy perspective,
prevention might not be so easy.
“Of course this cancer is rare and some may argue that it is hard to
make broad policies to impact the incidence of such a rare disease,”
Heck acknowledged. “I would say that our study contributes to the
literature examining the health risks in workers and their offspring
from occupational chemical exposures and provides another reason to
suggest that protections are taken.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2zEAR8k Occupational and Environmental
Medicine, online October 26, 2017.
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