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Flight attendants get more uterine, thyroid and other cancers, study finds
A flight attendant's life may look glamorous, but the job comes with health hazards that go beyond managing surly passengers. As a group, they get certain cancers more than the general population, according to a new study.
Scientists have long found that flight attendants get more breast cancer and melanoma. The new study, published Monday in the journal Environmental Health [open, DOI: 10.1186/s12940-018-0396-8], saw the same trend and detected a higher prevalence of every other cancer the researchers examined: Non-melanoma skin cancer, uterine, gastrointestinal, cervical and thyroid cancers were all seen at a higher rate in flight attendants.
"Something that somewhat surprised us, to some extent, was that we also saw a higher instance of breast cancer in women with three or more children," said study co-author Irina Mordukhovich, a research associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Typically, the more children a woman has, the lower her risk of breast cancer. A previous study showed a result similar to the new breast cancer finding [open, DOI: 10.1093/jtm/taw055] [DX], she said, but Mordukhovich didn't expect those findings would be replicated. "Women with three or more children are already probably not getting enough sleep," Mordukhovich said. "Combine that with this disruption from the job, especially for those who fly internationally, this may be an indication that the circadian rhythm disruption is having an impact."
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday June 29 2018, @12:38AM (6 children)
Did they just look at flight attendants or did they not manage to compare it to say Pilots (civilian or military) and astronauts, if it's just a matter of spending lots of time up in the air then both those groups should be getting just as high dosages. Perhaps even more since they usually just have that giant window in the front to look out of while most of the passengers are inside that big metal tube.
Also why the increase in skin cancer? Isn't that a bit odd. Did they account for other factors perhaps common in flight attendants? Such as living a life on the road, living in hotels and just having hundreds and hundreds of people breathing on them all day every day? They are really almost like little petridishes.
So was there a different between the 80% women and 20% men? if it was just flight attendants only -- or was there a pilot or general male comparison?
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Friday June 29 2018, @01:39AM (2 children)
Won't make any difference, I don't want to go and haul out textbooks for the exact figures but the attenutation of a skin of aluminium vs. glass/pastic will be about the same, you're dealing with lots of gamma and some protons, which require considerable shielding to block.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday June 29 2018, @12:36PM (1 child)
Cosmic rays are mostly muons. The dominant source of cosmics is protons striking the upper atmosphere and exciting pions, which rapidly decay to produce muons. Reference
http://pdg.lbl.gov/2015/reviews/rpp2015-rev-cosmic-rays.pdf [lbl.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @08:21PM
No, that's true at ground level. The primary cosmic ray shower component at passenger aircraft cruise altitudes are nucleons. You need to drop to around 6 km for the muons to be the same as the nucleons. See figure 28.4 from the link you provided.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 29 2018, @02:18AM (1 child)
The old religious taboos about casual sex have basis in disease and death, there's a factor.
Crazy schedules, crazy foods, crazy exposure to all the diseases of the world at much higher rates than the general population, all factors.
Live fast, die young - lots of them used to smoke back in the day, too. It's a lifestyle, a short lifestyle, but it's the one they choose.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @03:55AM
Any evidence for this....? Nah thought not.
Religious doctrine. Yep, plenty of that.
Good to go, Sir. Start banning shit and requiring faith-based solutions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @05:37AM
People with disturbed sleep cycles have a greater chance of cancer, especially breast cancer. There is a lot of research backing this up. It is trivial to assume most of their increase cancer risk is due to their odd work schedules.