Radon and childhood cancer

British Journal of Cancer (2002) 87, 1336–1337. doi:10.1038/sj.bjc.6600671 www.bjcancer.co

Is House-Dust Nicotine a Good Surrogate for Household Smoking?

The literature is inconsistent regarding associations between parental smoking and childhood leukemia, possibly because previous studies used self-reported smoking habits as surrogates for children's true exposures to cigarette smoke. Here, the authors investigated the use of nicotine concentrations in house dust as measures of children's exposure to cigarette smoke in 469 households from the Northern California Childhood Leukemia Study (1999–2007). House dust was collected by using high-volume surface samplers and household vacuum cleaners and was analyzed for nicotine via gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. Using multivariable linear regression, the authors evaluated the effects of self-reported parental smoking, parental demographics, house characteristics, and other covariates on house-dust nicotine concentrations. They observed that nicotine concentrations in house dust were associated with self-reported smoking for periods of months and years before dust collection. Furthermore, the authors found that the relation between nicotine dust levels and self-reported smoking varied by parental age and socioeconomic status. These findings suggest that house-dust nicotine concentrations reflect long-term exposures to cigarette smoke in the home and that they may be less biased surrogates for children's exposures to cigarette smoke than self-reported smoking habits

Childhood hematopoietic malignancies and parental use of tobacco and alcohol: the ESCALE study (SFCE).

International audienceOBJECTIVES: Investigating the role of parental smoking and maternal alcohol consumption in the etiology of childhood hematopoietic malignancies. METHODS: The national registry-based case-control study ESCALE was carried out in France over the period 2003-2004. Population controls were frequency matched with the cases on age and gender. Maternal smoking and alcohol consumption during pregnancy and paternal smoking since before conception were reported by the mothers in a structured telephone questionnaire. Odds ratios (OR) were estimated using unconditional regression models closely adjusted for potential confounders. RESULTS: A total of 765 cases of acute leukemia (AL), 130 of Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL), 165 of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) and 1681 controls were included. Paternal smoking was significantly associated with childhood ALL (OR = 1.4 [1.1-1.7]), AML (OR = 1.5 [1.0-2.3]), Burkitt (OR = 2.0 [1.2-3.2]), and anaplastic large cell (OR = 3.2 [1.2-9.1]) NHL. For the four diseases, the ORs significantly increased with the number of cigarettes smoked. No association with HL or with other types of NHL was observed. The associations with maternal alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking during pregnancy were less consistent. CONCLUSION: The results support the hypothesis that only paternal smoking, and not maternal alcohol consumption or cigarette smoking, plays a role in childhood hematopoietic malignancies