Meta-analysis of Incidence of Brain Cancer Among Aircrew

Brain and other nervous system cancer (BNSC) have been reported as the second reason of death from neurological illness.1 There is considerable interest in the correlation between cancer and employment as aircrew. Flight-based employees are deemed to have a higher risk of cancer owing to occupational exposures, mainly including cosmic ionizing radiation, circadian disruption, and extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs). However, epidemiological studies on the association between employment as aircrew and BNSC risk have reported inconsistent results.2-12 A possible explanation for these conflicting results could be that individual study, which had relatively small sample size, did not have sufficient statistical power to demonstrate any significant effect, therefore leading to broad confidence intervals. A previous meta-analysis of observational studies on cancer incidence published in 2005 focused only on male aircrew and examined all types of cancer as a whole, including BNSC.13 After that, several cohort studies regarding similar topics were conducted.12,14,15 The current meta-analysis was carried out to quantitatively evaluate BNSC incidence among aircrew of both genders on a larger sample size by combining the findings of all available studies. The study also aimed to increase the precision of risk estimates of BNSC incidence among aircrew. http://ijtmgh.com Int J Travel Med Glob Health. 2017 Feb;5(1):14-19 doi 10.15171/ijtmgh.2017.03 TMGH IInternational Journal of Travel Medicine and Global Health J