Healthcare professionals face significantly higher odds of being diagnosed with breast cancer compared to other women, according to a new large-scale longitudinal study published Monday.
The elevated risk was also associated with age, job tenure and professional licenses including physician, pharmacist, registered nurse, midwife, technologist and psychologist. These findings are based on more than 35 years of population-based data incorporating 830,000-plus Taiwanese women and published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
“Occupational health policy intervention may be necessary to further prevent breast cancer risk among female health professionals,” Cheng-Ting Shen MD, with the Department of Family Medicine at Kaohsiung Municipal Ta-Tung Hospital in Taiwan, and co-authors concluded. “Regular ultrasonography for younger women or mammography for women aged >45 years may be necessary in the annual labor physical examination for female health professionals,” they urged.
To reach their conclusions, Shen et al. tapped four nationwide databases in Taiwan with information spanning 1979-2016. That included nearly 278,000 healthcare professionals alongside more than 555,000 women working outside of the medical realm. Researchers compared cancer incidence between the two groups and stratified by birth age, job tenure and other categories.
Shen and colleagues found a much higher risk of breast cancer among healthcare professionals, with a hazard ratio of 1.34. Health workers over the age of 35 — in all tenure categories, and with several license types — had a much higher risk of breast cancer than those outside the field.
Investigators pinpointed rotating day-night shift work as one potential cause of this disparity, along with exposure to ionizing radiation. The former is associated with short sleep duration, exposure to light and disrupted circadian rhythms, while the latter brings excess risk of leukemia, skin or breast cancer. Psychologists also had a 3.58-fold higher risk of breast cancer than nonhealthy pros, with higher numbers earlier in their job tenure.
“Further research is necessary investigating individual occupational exposures and breast cancer risk among female health professionals,” the authors advised.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.