Residential History, Environmental Exposure in Mesothelioma Cases

A complete residential history should be reviewed following a mesothelioma diagnosis to examine a patient’s environmental exposure in depth compared with only the patient’s current address, according to Bian Liu and colleagues, who led a study that assessed exposure to ambient air toxics and socioeconomic status.

“Environmental exposure to nonasbestos air toxics among mesothelioma patients may be underestimated if based solely on the address at diagnosis,” the researchers said. By relying on this information alone, exposure could be misclassified.

In the study, more than 1000 mesothelioma cases were evaluated. Patients were identified through the New York State Cancer Registry and had received a diagnosis from 2011 to 2015. The researchers then used LexisNexis to find residential histories.

More than 40% of patients had a 30-year residential history available, and nearly all (96%) patients had information accessible for up to 5 years. The researchers learned that patients had lived in a median number of four unique places.

The study showed that the time-weighted average relative exposure from all addresses available had a median of −0.11 for air toxics and −0.28 for socioeconomic status. These rankings were based on the National Air Toxic Assessment and United States Census data, respectively.

Furthermore, relative exposure to air toxics was significantly higher for earlier addresses than addresses at diagnosis for both the 5-year and 30-year lookback windows.

“With geospatial data becoming more readily available, incorporating cancer patients’ residential history would lead to reduced exposure misclassification and accurate health risk estimates,” the researchers said.