Waste incinerator and human health: a state-of-the-art review

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Published on Monday, 30 June 2008 18:23

Article in Italian
Signorelli C, Riccò M, Vinceti M.
Ann Ig. 2008 May-Jun;20(3):251-77. PMID: 18693403

Emissions of municipal solid waste incinerator plants consist as a suspected risk factor for the human health. Scientific literature about this theme appears contradictory: main sanitary outcomes actually evaluated, stating on geographic-or occupational-based epidemiologic approaches, produced inconsistent results. Research procedures applied, and effective quality of analyzed data, are the likely causes of such dissimilarities. Up to date, respiratory, cardiovascular renal, and hormonal pathologies, and also neoplasia, and developmental/reproductive disorders have been related to this kind of exposures: otherwise, an objective review of available data suggests a consistent relation only between residential or occupational exposure and the latter outcomes, always as a topic of multifactorial models. Finally, rigorous public health surveillance programs on exposed subjects appear mandatory steps to be established by Institutional Authorities. Also more accurate epidemiologic studies should be designed, eventually associating the retrieval of data relative to biomarkers of exposure or early health effect.

Case-control study of toenail cadmium and prostate cancer risk in Italy

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Published on Thursday, 01 February 2007 18:25

Vinceti M, Venturelli M, Sighinolfi C, Trerotoli P, Bonvicini F, Ferrari A, Bianchi G, Serio G, Bergomi M, Vivoli G.
Sci Total Environ. 2007 Feb 1;373(1):77-81. PMID: 17175009

Abstract

A role of cadmium exposure in prostate cancer etiology has been suggested by epidemiologic and laboratory studies, but conclusive evidence on this topic is still lacking. We investigated the relation between cadmium exposure, estimated by determining toenails cadmium levels, and prostate cancer risk in forty patients newly diagnosed with prostate cancer and fifty-eight hospital controls recruited in two provinces from southern and northern Italy. We found an excess cancer risk in subjects in the third and fourth (highest) quartiles of toenail cadmium concentration (odds ratio 1.3 and 4.7, respectively) compared with subjects in the bottom quartile. Results were basically unchanged when limiting the analysis to each province or entering toenail cadmium concentrations as continuous values in the regression model (P=0.004). Despite the limited statistical stability of the point estimates, these findings appear to support the hypothesis that cadmium exposure increases prostate cancer risk.