Preprint
Article
Combining Three Cohorts of WTC Rescue/Recovery Workers for Assessing Cancer Incidence and Mortality
This version is not peer-reviewed.
Submitted:
05 January 2021
Posted:
06 January 2021
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Abstract
Three cohorts including the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY), the World Trade Center Health Registry (WTCHR), and the General Responder Cohort (GRC), each funded by the World Trade Center Health Program have reported associations between WTC-exposures and cancer. Results have generally been consistent with effect estimates for excess incidence for all cancers ranging from 6 to 14% above background rates. Pooling would increase sample size and de-duplicate cases between the cohorts. Pooling required time consuming steps: obtaining IRB approvals and legal agreements from entities involved; establishing an honest broker for managing the data; de-duplicating the pooled cohort files; applying to State Cancer Registries (SCRs) for matched cancer cases; and finalizing analysis data files. Obtaining SCR data use agreements ranged from 6.5 to 114.5 weeks with six states requiring >20 weeks. Records from FDNY (n=16,221), WTCHR (n=29,372), and GRC (n=33,427) were combined de-duplicated resulting in 69,102 unique individuals. Overall, 7,894 cancer tumors were matched to the pooled cohort, increasing the number cancers by as much as 58% compared to previous analyses. Pooling resulted in a coherent resource for future research for studies on rare cancers and mortality, with more representative of occupations and WTC- exposure.
Keywords:
World Trade Center; Exposure; Cancer; Rescue and recovery workers; Pooling cohorts
Subject:
Medicine and Pharmacology - Immunology and AllergyCopyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
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