Source: www.yle.fi
Author: staff

A new study shows that cancer risk could depend on a person’s job description.

A recently released Nordic study shows how different careers contribute to different forms and incident rates of cancer.

Lifestyle factors that are linked to specific careers are often a major influence on who gets cancer and who does not.

For example the study found that male bar workers had the highest incidents of developing cancer.

Workers in the restaurant and bar industry were most likely to get cancer of the larynx, mouth, tongue, liver, lung, urinary tract and colon.

It is more acceptable for workers to smoke and drink alcohol at a bar or restaurant than for example at a school, the study found.

The study found that tobacco, asbestos and alcohol – especially in combination with each other – are the biggest cancer-causing factors.

Male plumbers who have been exposed to asbestos have a 20 percent higher risk of developing some form of cancer than, for example, farmers.

Lung cancer is six times more common in women who work as machine operator compared with their female farming counterparts.

Incidents of breast cancer are highest among women who go through long years of education to reach career goals.

For example, many female doctors and dentists wait longer than other groups before having children, which itself raises the risk of breast cancer.

Not only workers at risk

But it is not merely the employed and educated that see an increased risk. Unemployed men who drink alcohol excessively are statistically in the same risk group as bar and restaurant workers.

Risks for unemployed women, the report found, were significantly lower.

This group’s statistics might be complicated by the fact that many of them are not in the workforce due to raising children or working on family farms.

Careers that yielded the lowest incidents of cancer include: farmers, landscaping workers, fishermen and forestry workers. Also priests, deacons and deaconesses, teachers and physicians were in low risk occupations.

The study also found that some forms of cancer were not especially job related. Incidents of intestinal cancer and brain tumors varied greatly among people in various careers.

Director of Statistics at the Finnish Cancer Registry Eero Pukkala led the study’s workgroup that compared the medical history of 15 million people and how that correlated with their careers. Of those millions, 2.8 million had developed some form of cancer.

The statistics were collected from the Nordic countries’ population registries over a thirty year period, between 1960 and 1990. A follow up to the study reaches as far as 2005 and will be published in the cancer periodical Acta Oncologica this month.