Traditionally, occupational research has focused primarily on white men, even though women comprise 46% of the U.S. civilian workforce, and minorities are often employed in jobs with hazardous exposures. As a follow-up to the International Conference on Womens Health: Occupation, Cancer and Reproduction in Spring, 1998, which was partially supported by the Occupational Epidemiology Branch, OEB scientists have published a number of peer-reviewed papers in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. These include papers on the research status and methodologic considerations on occupational cancer among women and healthy worker effect for cancer incidence, and several papers on occupational risk factors for cancers of the brain, central nervous system, and kidney, as well as cancer mortality among women employed in health care occupation or exposed to silica. To follow-up these leads, research is underway to evaluate healthy worker effect for cancer mortality in women and risk factors for kidney cancer in a Swedish linked occupation and tumor registry cohort study. Branch investigators also have published two papers examining the racial and gender differences in occupational risk factors for pancreatic cancer. The role of occupational physical activity and risk for various cancers is being evaluated in the Swedish cohort study and will be reported in a number of upcoming papers. In addition, the OEB has undertaken a number of epidemiologic studies designed to evaluate the health risks associated with occupation among women and minority populations during the past year. Currently a telephone interview survey is updating exposure information in the Agricultural Health Study, a prospective cohort study of more than 90,000 subjects, including approximately 32,000 women and 2,000 minorities. Both direct occupational exposure and indirect environmental exposure to pesticides and other exposures will be evaluated in the study. The Shanghi Womens Study is a prospective cohort study conducted in collaboration with the University of South Carolina and the Shanghai Cancer Institute. This study is expected to be completed by December 1999. It is estimated that a urine sample will be collected from nealy all participants and a blood sample from about 55,000 subjects. For women who declined blood donation, collection of buccal cells is being planned. This cohort will provide a valuable resource for evaluation of lifestyle, occupational, environmental, and genetic risk factors among women. In another on-going prospective cohort study among participants in a screening trial (PLCO Study), about 50,000 women have been enrolled for follow-up studies of cancer risk factors. Other studies are also underway that focus on cancer among hairdressers, aircraft maintenance workers, and dry cleaners on the relationships between occupational exposures, particularly pesticides, solvents, and dusts, and non-Hodgkins lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and cancers of the pancreas, brain, and stomach in projects which include women and minorities. Feasibility projects were also conducted for the study of cancer among migrant farm workers, the majority of whom are Hispanic. Questionnaires involving an innovative life events-icon method of collecting occupational histories were developed and tested as well as projects to test the ability to trace farm workers over extended periods of time, to study mortality patterns, to evaluate cancer diagnosis and treatment patterns, to assess exposures via biological measures using cord blood, and to add epidemiologic variables to a national data base of information collected from farmworkers who are applying for social services. The materials and methods developed in the feasibility projects will help NCI and others to launch full-scale studies of cancer. The results from a pilot study determining probable pesticide exposures was presented in the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology in September 1999. In addition, analyses are on-going in several case-control studies that include a large proportion of women and minorities, including a study of occupational and environmental cancer risk factors in Iowa, a 24-State death certificate study, a multicenter study of cancer risks among whites and African Americans, case-control studies of stomach cancer in Mexico and Poland, a case-control study of several gastrointestinal cancers in Shanghai, China, and a study of oral cancer in Puerto Rico.
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