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Abstract

Urinary bladder cancer in coal miners is currently under debate. We report on a recently performed study on 196 bladder cancer cases (80% male) from Dortmund, a centre of the former underground hard coal mining industry in Germany. A total of 235 controls (77% male), with benign urological diseases but without a history of malignancies, were assessed by questionnaire from July 2009 to December 2010. From the sample, there were twenty bladder cancer cases (10%) and 8 controls (3%) who had an occupational history of hard coal mining (OR 3.22, 95% CI 1.39 - 7.49; brown coal mining: 2 cases, no control). During the late 1940s and 1950s, the average working life for hard coal miners was less than 20 years. These findings are consistent with an earlier study in this area on 412 male bladder cancer patients and 414 controls with benign prostatic hyperplasia that were investigated from 1984 to 1988. The study presented a smoking-adjusted odds ratio for bladder cancer of 2.54 (95% CI 1.64 - 3.93). Aromatic amines were not found to be a constituent of hard coal. Furthermore, the slow N-acetyltransferase 2 status, which is associated with an increased bladder cancer risk in persons formerly exposed to aromatic amines, was normal in hard coal miners with bladder cancer in two studies in the Dortmund area. The results of the studies in the Dortmund area indicate that the increased bladder cancer risk in underground hard coal minrs was not caused by exposure to carcinogenic aromatic amines.