Occupational Exposure to Silica and Lung Cancer: Pooled Analysis of Two Case-Control Studies in Montreal, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Respirable crystalline silica is a highly prevalent occupational exposure and a recognized lung carcinogen. Most previous studies have focused on selected high-exposure occupational groups. This study examines the relationship between occupational exposure to silica and lung cancer in an occupationally diverse male population. METHODS: Two large population-based case-control studies of lung cancer were conducted in Montreal, one in 1979-1986 (857 cases, 533 population controls, 1,349 cancer controls) and the second in 1996-2001 (738 cases and 899 controls). Interviews provided descriptive lifetime job histories, smoking histories, and other information. Industrial hygienists translated job histories into histories of exposure to a host of occupational substances, including silica. Relative risk was estimated, adjusting for several potential confounders, including smoking. RESULTS: The odds ratio for substantial exposure to silica was 1.67 (95% confidence interval, 1.21-2.31) and for any exposure was 1.31 (95% confidence interval, 1.08-1.59). Joint effects between silica and smoking were between additive and multiplicative, perhaps closer to the latter. In this population, it is estimated that approximately 3% of lung cancers were attributable to substantial silica exposure. CONCLUSIONS: The carcinogenicity of inhaled crystalline silica was observed in a population with a wide variety of exposure circumstances. IMPACT: The finding of carcinogenicity across a wide range of occupations complements prior studies of specific high-exposure occupations. This suggests that the burden of cancer induced by silica may be much greater than previously thought.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".