MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

8292418 Lung cancer risk among 2.2 million Ontario workers: joint effects of co-exposure to five occupational carcinogens by sex

2025· article· en· W4414852951 on OpenAlexaffabout
Tracy L Kirkham, Fatima Ali, Jeavana Sritharan, Tanya Navaneelan, Shannon Halls, Nathan DeBono, Paul A. Demers

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicOccupational and environmental lung diseases
Canadian institutionsOccupational Cancer Research Centre
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLung cancerCancerCarcinogenRelative riskProportional hazards modelCancer registryPairwise comparisonCohort

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Objectives Several occupational exposures cause lung cancer, but few studies have examined co-exposure effects. We aim to investigate the joint effects of exposure to five carcinogens— asbestos, chromium VI, nickel, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and benzo-a-pyrene (BaP) as a surrogate of PAH exposure, and silica— on lung cancer risk. Methods Lung cancer cases were identified from the Ontario Cancer Registry between 1983 to 2019 from a large cohort of Ontario workers. Exposure status (exposed/non-exposed) was assigned to workers based on their occupation using the Canadian job-exposure matrix for each carcinogen. Cox proportional hazards models estimated associations of carcinogen exposure on lung cancer risk overall, by sex, and by subtype, controlling for age, sex, and birth-year. Joint effects were analyzed using pairwise interaction models assessed on multiplicative and additive scales using the relative excess risk due to interaction (RERI). Results Overall, 36,125 lung cancer cases were identified among 2,223,408 workers. In preliminary analysis, joint effects of co-exposure to asbestos/silica (RERI= 0.27, 95% CI: 0.15, 0.39), BaP/silica (RERI=0.28, 95% CI: 0.17, 0.39), PAHS/silica (RERI=0.14, 95% CI: 0.05, 0.23), and chromium/BaP (RERI= 0.20, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.42) were more than additive. Conversely, joint effects of asbestos/PAHs (RERI: -0.44, 95% CI: -0.68, -0.24), BaP/nickel (RERI= -0.11, 95% CI: -0.21, -0.01), and chromium/PAHs (RERI=-0.38, 95% CI: -0.60, -0.18) were less than additive. The remaining pairwise joint effects did not significantly depart from additivity. The pattern of results was similar among male workers, but no pairwise joint effects significantly departed from additivity for females. Differences by lung cancer sub-type and additional analyses to follow. Conclusion Significant interaction effects were observed. Ongoing joint effects analysis may help identify high-risk occupations/industries by discovering the most impactful exposure combinations.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.088
Threshold uncertainty score0.178

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.006
GPT teacher head0.260
Teacher spread0.254 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same topicOccupational and environmental lung diseasesFrench-language works237,207