Radiation and Environmental Biophysics

, Volume 53, Issue 3, pp 505–513 | Cite as

Kidney cancer mortality and ionizing radiation among French and German uranium miners

  • Damien Drubay
  • Sophie Ancelet
  • Alain Acker
  • Michaela Kreuzer
  • Dominique Laurier
  • Estelle Rage
Original Paper
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

The investigation of potential adverse health effects of occupational exposures to ionizing radiation, on uranium miners, is an important area of research. Radon is a well-known carcinogen for lung, but the link between radiation exposure and other diseases remains controversial, particularly for kidney cancer. The aims of this study were therefore to perform external kidney cancer mortality analyses and to assess the relationship between occupational radiation exposure and kidney cancer mortality, using competing risks methodology, from two uranium miners cohorts. The French (n = 3,377) and German (n = 58,986) cohorts of uranium miners included 11 and 174 deaths from kidney cancer. For each cohort, the excess of kidney cancer mortality has been assessed by standardized mortality ratio (SMR) corrected for the probability of known causes of death. The associations between cumulative occupational radiation exposures (radon, external gamma radiation and long-lived radionuclides) or kidney equivalent doses and both the cause-specific hazard and the probability of occurrence of kidney cancer death have been estimated with Cox and Fine and Gray models adjusted to date of birth and considering the attained age as the timescale. No significant excess of kidney cancer mortality has been observed neither in the French cohort (SMR = 1.49, 95 % confidence interval [0.73; 2.67]) nor in the German cohort (SMR = 0.91 [0.77; 1.06]). Moreover, no significant association between kidney cancer mortality and any type of occupational radiation exposure or kidney equivalent dose has been observed. Future analyses based on further follow-up updates and/or large pooled cohorts should allow us to confirm or not the absence of association.

Keywords

Kidney cancer mortality Ionizing radiation Uranium miners Competing risks 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This work was partly supported by AREVA NC, in the framework of a bilateral IRSN-AREVA-NC research agreement, and by the European Commission through the DoReMI program (low Dose Research toward Multidisciplinary Integration). The authors thank Florian Dufey for his valuable contribution.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • Damien Drubay
    • 1
  • Sophie Ancelet
    • 1
  • Alain Acker
    • 2
  • Michaela Kreuzer
    • 3
  • Dominique Laurier
    • 1
  • Estelle Rage
    • 1
  1. 1.Laboratory of EpidemiologyInstitut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN)Fontenay-aux-Roses cedexFrance
  2. 2.AREVA NCParisFrance
  3. 3.Department of Radiation Protection and HealthFederal Office for Radiation Protection and HealthNeuherbergGermany

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