Role of occupational exposures in lung cancer risk among women

To explore possible associations between selected occupational agents and lung cancer risk among women.

A population-based case-control study on lung cancer was conducted from 1996 to 2001 in Montreal, Canada. Cases were individuals diagnosed with incident lung cancer and population controls were randomly selected from electoral lists and frequency-matched to age and sex distributions of cases. Questionnaires on lifetime occupational history, smoking and demographic characteristics were collected during in-person interviews. As part of a comprehensive exposure assessment protocol, experts reviewed each subject's work history and assessed exposure to many agents. The current analysis, restricted to working women in the study, includes 361 cases and 521 controls. We examined the association between lung cancer and each of 22 occupational exposures, chosen because of their relatively high prevalences among these women. Each exposure was analysed in a separate multivariate logistic regression model, adjusted for smoking and other selected covariates.

There were few elevated OR estimates between lung cancer and any of the agents, and none were statistically significant, although the limited numbers of exposed women engendered wide CIs.

There was little evidence to suggest that women in this population had experienced excess risks of lung cancer as a result of their work exposures. However, the wide CIs preclude any strong inferences in this regard.