School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE, United Kingdom.
Department of Social Medicine, University of Sao Paulo, Ribeirao Preto, Brazil.
Chemosphere. 2018 Oct;209:623-631. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2018.06.118. Epub 2018 Jun 20.
Environmental factors may increase colon cancer (CC) risk. It has been suggested that pesticides could play a significant role in the etiology of this malignancy. As agriculture is one of the mainstays of the Brazilian economy, this country has become the largest pesticides consumer worldwide. The CC burden is also increasing in Brazil. Herein, we examined data from the Brazilian Federal Government to determine whether CC mortality and pesticide consumption may be associated. Database of the Ministry of Health provided CC mortality data in Brazil, while pesticide usage was accessed at the website of Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources. The CC mortality in the Brazilian states was calculated as standard mortality rates (SMR). All Bayesian analysis was performed using a Markov chain Monte Carlo method in WinBUGS software. We observed that CC mortality has exhibited a steady increase for more than a decade, which correlated with the amount of sold pesticides in the country. Both observations are concentrated in the Southern and the Southeast regions of Brazil. Although ecological studies like ours have methodological limitations, the current dataset suggests the possibility that pesticide exposure may be a risk factor for CC. It warrants further investigation.
环境因素可能会增加结肠癌（CC）的风险。有研究表明，农药可能在这种恶性肿瘤的病因中起重要作用。由于农业是巴西经济的主要支柱之一，该国已成为世界上最大的农药消费国。巴西的 CC 负担也在增加。在此，我们检查了巴西联邦政府的数据，以确定 CC 死亡率和农药使用量是否存在关联。卫生部数据库提供了巴西的 CC 死亡率数据，而农药使用情况则可在巴西环境和可再生自然资源研究所的网站上获取。巴西各州的 CC 死亡率计算为标准化死亡率（SMR）。所有贝叶斯分析均使用 WinBUGS 软件中的马尔可夫链蒙特卡罗方法进行。我们观察到，CC 死亡率在十多年来一直在稳步上升，这与该国销售的农药数量有关。这两个观察结果都集中在巴西的南部和东南部地区。尽管像我们这样的生态研究存在方法学上的限制，但当前数据集表明，农药暴露可能是 CC 的一个风险因素。这值得进一步调查。
