Influence of Alternative Exposure Estimates in the Diesel Exhaust Miners Study: Diesel Exhaust and Lung Cancer

Kenny S. Crump, Cynthia Van Landingham and Roger O. McClellan

Risk Analysis, 2016, vol. 36, issue 9, 1803-1812

Abstract: The landmark Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study (DEMS) studied the relationship between diesel exhaust exposure (DEE) and lung cancer mortality of workers at eight nonmetal mines who were followed from beginning of dieselization of the mines (1947–1967) through December 31, 1997. The original analyses quantified DEE exposures using exposure to respirable elemental carbon (REC) to represent DEE, and CO as a surrogate for REC. However, this use of CO data, and the CO data themselves, have numerous shortcomings. We developed new estimates of REC exposures using historical data on use of diesel equipment, diesel engine horsepower (HP), mine ventilation rates, and the documented reduction in particulate matter emissions per HP in diesel engines from 1975 through 1995. These new REC estimates were applied in a conditional logistic regression of the DEMS nested case‐control data very similar to the one applied in the original DEMS analyses. None of the trend slopes calculated using the new REC estimates were statistically significant (p > 0.05). Moreover, these trend slopes were smaller by roughly factors of five without control for radon exposure and factors of 12 with control for radon exposure compared to those estimated in the original DEMS analyses. Also, the 95% confidence intervals for these trend slopes had only minimal overlap with those for the slopes in the original DEMS analyses. These results underscore the uncertainty in estimates of the potency of diesel exhaust in causing lung cancer based on analysis of the DEMS data due to uncertainty in estimates of exposures to diesel exhaust.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.12556

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:riskan:v:36:y:2016:i:9:p:1803-1812

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Risk Analysis from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().