Traffic‐related air pollution and risk for leukaemia of an adult population

Air pollution causes lung cancer, but associations with other cancers have not been established. We investigated whether long-term exposure to traffic-related air pollution is associated with the risk of the general population for leukaemia. We identified 1,967 people in whom leukaemia was diagnosed in 1992-2010 from a nation-wide cancer registry and selected 3,381 control people at random, matched on sex and year of birth, from the entire Danish population. Residential addresses since 1971 were traced in a population registry, and outdoor concentrations of NOx and NO2 , as indicators of traffic-related air pollution, were calculated at each address in a dispersion model. We used conditional logistic regression to estimate the risk for leukaemia after adjustment for income, educational level, cohabitation status and co-morbidity. In linear analyses, we found odds ratios for acute myeloid leukaemia of 1.20 (95% confidence interval: 1.04-1.38) per 20 µg/m(3) increase in NOx and 1.31 (1.02-1.68) per 10 µg/m(3) increase in NO2 , calculated as time-weighted average exposure at all addresses since 1971. We found no association with chronic myeloid or lymphocytic leukaemia. This study indicates an association between long-term exposure to traffic-related air pollution and acute myeloid leukaemia in the general population, but not for other subtypes of leukaemia.