Asbestos Exposure may Raise Colon Cancer Risk
Date: 11-Nov-05
Country: USA
Author: Will Boggs, MD
"This issue has been long contentious, and raises the interesting issue of how the fibers cause cancer in the gut (through which they presumably travel quickly)," Dr. Mark R. Cullen from Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut told Reuters Health.
Asbestos fibers are known to cause a type of cancer of the lung, where they can lodge after being inhaled. Dr. Cullen and associates used data from a cancer prevention trial to investigate the risk of colorectal cancer among nearly 4000 men.
The investigators explain in the American Journal of Epidemiology that they compared a non-asbestos-exposed heavy-smoker subgroup of participants with an asbestos-exposed "smoker-eligible" subgroup.
Men in the asbestos-exposed group were 36 percent more likely to develop colorectal cancer than were men in the heavy-smoker (non-asbestos-exposed) cohort, the researchers report.
Participants with 21 to 30 years of exposure had a 74 percent increased risk of colorectal cancer compared with those with less than 10 years of exposure, the report indicates, but time since first asbestos exposure did not predict the risk of colorectal cancer.
Colorectal cancer screening "should be aggressively pursued in view of their higher risk," Cullen said.
"Heavily exposed men get preventable as well as, sadly, unpreventable cancers," Dr. Cullen commented. "This is one disease we can do something about; hence, this should be one focus of care for these men."
SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology, November 1, 2005.
