[ CancerWeb Home
| Comments
| Up One Level ]
In a related vein, the question of whether smoking and drinking by parents predisposes infants to cancer, leukemia in particular, has been hotly debated. A report from the Pediatric Epidemiology Research Unit at the University of Minnesota, also presented at the AACR Meeting (ICDB/95609436), showed that maternal (but not paternal) drinking during pregnancy was associated with increased risk for infants in the first 18 months of a diagnosis of acute lymphoid leukemia (odds ratio 1.43) and acute myeloid leukemia (odds ratio 2.64), the risk for the latter increased with greater alcohol consumption. Smoking was not related to leukemia risk. Information was obtained through independent telephone interview of mothers of 302 cases and 558 individually matched controls, and fathers of 250 cases and 361 controls.
Finally, in the ever-expanding search for causes of cancer, antidepressants and benzodiazepine tranquilizers were implicated in a study carried out at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston (ICDB/95609432). There was an increased risk of ovarian cancer (adjusted odds ratios 2.2 and 1.8, respectively) associated with more than 1-6 months use of antidepressants or benzodiazepine tranquilizers. The association was confined to women who first used them before age 50 (odds ratios 3.5 and 2.7, respectively). There was no link to other medications. Cases were women diagnosed with ovarian cancer during the periods 11/78-09/81 and 07/84-09/87. Controls were from Massachusetts town telephone books and matched to cases by age, race, and town of residence.