Cancer
No Elevated Risk of Cancer in Women of Southeastern Louisiana 12 Years after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Tyler Prusisz* Tyler Prusisz Ariane Rung Mei-Chin Hsieh Evrim Oral Edward Trapido Elizabeth Levitzky Edward Peters
Background: Oil spills are reoccurring ecological disasters that cause extensive damage not only to the environment, but also to physical and mental health. However, as demand for oil continues to increase, critical gaps exist in our understanding of how these spills affect cancer risk.
Methods: We linked the Women and Their Children’s Health Study (WaTCH), which recruited women between the ages of 18 and 80 in southeastern Louisiana following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DHOS), the largest in marine history, to the Louisiana Tumor Registry to examine the affect of economic, physical, and overall oil spill exposure on in-situ and malignant cancer. We compared age-adjusted cancer incidence rates of the 2,847 women in the WaTCH cohort to Louisiana-wide rates. Adjusted Cox proportional hazard and Poisson regression models estimated the risk of cancer from oil spill exposures.
Results: The age-adjusted cancer incidence rates for the WaTCH cohort and all of Louisiana were 609.8 (95% Confidence Interval [CI]: 482.9 – 762.6) and 652.3 (95% CI: 648.8 – 655.8) cases per 100,000 women per year, respectively. The calculated hazard ratio for time to cancer (199 cases) from total oil spill exposure was 0.945 (95% CI: 0.855 – 1.043). Findings were similar for site-specific cancer and economic and physical oil spill metrics.
Conclusions: Our findings indicate that there is no increased risk of cancer in the women of southeastern Louisiana 12 years after the DHOS.
Impact: Our study is the first to prospectively examine the association between oil spill exposure and cancer incidence.