Children and young people show elevated leukaemia rates near nuclear ...( Leukaemia rates in children and young ...),Health

Leukaemia rates in children and young people are elevated near nuclear facilities, but no clear explanation exists to explain the rise, according to a research review published in the July issue of European Journal of Cancer Care.

Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina carried out a sophisticated meta-analysis of 17 research papers covering 136 nuclear sites in the UK, Canada, France, the USA, Germany, Japan and Spain.

They found that death rates for children up to the age of nine were elevated by between five and 24 per cent, depending on their proximity to nuclear facilities, and by two to 18 per cent in children and young people up to the age of 25.

Incidence rates were increased by 14 to 21 per cent in zero to nine year olds and seven to ten percent in zero to 25 year-olds.

Childhood leukaemia is a rare disease and nuclear sites are commonly found in rural areas, which means that sample sizes tend to be small says lead author Dr Peter J Baker.

The advantage of carrying out a meta-analysis is that it enables us to draw together a number of studies that have employed common methods and draw wider conclusions.

Eight separate analyses were performed including unadjusted, random and fixed effect models and the figures they produced showed considerable consistency.

But the authors point out that dose-response studies they looked at - which describe how an organism is affected by different levels of exposure - did not show excess rates near nuclear facilities.

Several difficulties arise when conducting dose-response studies in an epidemiological setting as they rely on a wide range of factors that are often hard to quantify explains Dr Baker. It is also possible that there are environmental issues involved that we dont yet understand.

If the amount of exposure were too low to cause the excess risk, we would expect leukaemia rates to remain consisten
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Contact: Annette Whibley
wizard.media@virgin.net
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
18-Jul-2007