Abstract B086: Sociodemographic inequities in carcinogenic industrial air pollution exposures among women in a U.S. cohort
Authors: Madrigal Jessica M. , Fisher Jared , Graubard Barry , Ward Mary , Jones Rena 
Published: December 2023

Purpose: In the U.S. industrial pollution disproportionately burdens under-resourced communities, but little is known about the amount of potential exposure to carcinogenic industrial air pollutants and their associations with cancer risk, especially for female cancers with known racial disparities. We assessed exposures to airborne carcinogenic emissions by race/ethnicity, education, and neighborhood deprivation.  Methods: We used a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency nationwide database of regulated chemical emissions from industrial facilities to estimate historical exposures (1987-1995) to 21 known and 30 probable carcinogens for participants in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study. This prospective cohort includes 177,806 women enrolled in 1995-1996. We estimated chemical emissions from facilities within 2km of the enrollment residence, adjusted for distance from the home and wind direction. We compared exposure prevalence by race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and a study-specific census tract-level neighborhood deprivation index derived from 20 measures of socioeconomic status (SES) by calculating proportions exposed from each population group. We included these variables in the same ordinal logistic regression model to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) comparing the highest category of emissions (highest tertile (T3) or &gt;90th percentile) to the referent group (zero emissions) for all sociodemographic characteristics, additionally adjusted for urbanicity and state of residence.  Results: The majority identified as non-Hispanic White (89%), followed by non-Hispanic Black (6%), Hispanic/Latina (2%) and Asian (1%). Despite comprising a smaller proportion of the cohort, Black women were nearly twice as likely (20%) as White women (11%) to live within 2km of an exposure source, whereas proportions among Hispanic/Latina (13%) and Asian women (12%) were similar to those among White women. Similar patterns were observed with low educational attainment (≤high school vs. college educated) and living in areas with high (T3) compared to low (T1) deprivation. In mutually adjusted models, compared to White women, Asian (OR=1.4, CI 1.2-1.5), Black (OR=1.4, CI 1.3-1.5), and Hispanic/Latina (OR=1.5, CI 1.4-1.6) women had 1.4-1.6 times greater exposure burden to any known or probable carcinogen, with similar estimates for benzene, cadmium, dichloromethane, lead, perchlorate, and styrene. Low educational attainment and high neighborhood deprivation were associated with up to 2-fold higher odds of being heavily exposed.  Conclusions: We demonstrated notable disparities in environmental exposure to airborne carcinogens by race/ethnicity and individual and neighborhood-level measures of SES. Existing etiologic and mechanistic evidence supports the role of some of these chemicals as carcinogens for sites with known disparities. Future efforts to evaluate associations of these exposures with cancer risk are warranted, particularly in populations with sufficient power to evaluate risk separately by race/ethnicity and SES.

Citation Format: Jessica M. Madrigal, Jared Fisher, Barry Graubard, Mary Ward, Rena Jones. Sociodemographic inequities in carcinogenic industrial air pollution exposures among women in a U.S. cohort [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 16th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2023 Sep 29-Oct 2;Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2023;32(12 Suppl):Abstract nr B086.