Issue:
There are approximately 60 well-established workplace carcinogens. However, there are many more industrial chemicals and other agents that are suspected to cause cancer, and still more that have never been studied. Currently, Canada lacks any rapid means to assess whether there is an increased risk associated with an exposure or what the risk of cancer is among people with the same job or working in the same industry. The major challenge is that, although Canada collects very good information on every new cancer that is diagnosed, there is no way to identify where these patients worked.
Objectives:
1) Estimate the efficiency of probabilistic linkage between the WSIB time loss claims administrative database and the Ontario Cancer Registry.
2) Determine the size of a resulting cohort.
3) Characterize the occupations and industries represented particularly their prevalence and distribution within the sample.
4) Estimate the number of cancer cases among the sample, particularly for rarer tumours such as mesothelioma and sino-nasal adenocarcinomas.
5) Use the results from objectives 2-4 to analyze the statistical power available for tests of association between occupational exposures of interest (e.g. wood dust, shift work) and individual types of cancer (e.g. breast, prostate, bladder).
Anticipated Results:
The goal of this project is to test a new way to monitor and measure workplace risk factors for cancer. When workers make claims to the WSIB for time lost, their claims contain information on their occupations and industries. These claims can be linked to records of cancer diagnoses held by Cancer Care Ontario to compare risks of cancer for different occupations and industries. This project will adapt methods developed by researchers in Alberta and British Columbia and test how well linking the records will work in Ontario.
Investigators:
Paul A. Demers (Cancer Care Ontario, Occupational Cancer Research Centre)
