The occurrence of bladder cancer in residents of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont has been approximately 20 percent higher than the overall U.S. bladder cancer rates. Arsenic in drinking water has been previously linked to bladder cancer in other studies.
For the study, researchers compared information on 1,213 newly diagnosed bladder cancer patients with 1,418 people without bladder cancer who lived in the geographic regions. The data was collected across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The gathered information examined risk factors like smoking, occupational hazards, family history, use of wood-burning stoves and diet.
“Although smoking and employment in high-risk occupations both showed their expected associations with bladder cancer risk in this population, they were similar to those found in other populations,” said Debra Silverman, ScD, chief of the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch, National Cancer Institute, and senior author on the study. “This suggests that neither risk factor explains the excess occurrence of bladder cancer in northern New England.”
With information on both the historical and current levels of arsenic in well drinking water, researchers were able to estimate the rates of arsenic ingestion via drinking water for the examined population. When researchers zeroed in on private well users, they found that individuals who drank the most water had nearly twice the risk of those who drank the least. The association increased if dug wells — shallow wells susceptible to manmade contaminations — were the water source. Most of the dug well use monitored in the study occurred many years ago when little information on arsenic in private well water was available.
“There are effective interventions to lower arsenic concentrations in water,” said Dr. Silverman. “New England has active public health education campaigns instructing residents to test their water supply and to install and maintain filters if levels are above the EPA threshold.”
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