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Carcinogenesis Advance Access originally published online on March 14, 2007
Carcinogenesis 2007 28(5):913-915; doi:10.1093/carcin/bgm034
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

‘Environment’ in cancer causation and etiological fraction: limitations and ambiguities

Paolo Boffetta1,*, Joseph K. McLaughlin2, Carlo la Vecchia3, Philippe Autier1 and Peter Boyle1

1 International Agency for Research on Cancer, 150 cours Albert-Thomas, 69008 Lyon, France
2 International Epidemiology Institute, 20850 Rockville, MD, USA
3 Mario Negri Institute, 20157 Milan, Italy

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +33 4 72738441; Fax: +33 4 72738320; Email: boffetta@iarc.fr

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   The notion of environmental cancer
 
The definition of environment refers to external physical conditions that may affect human health (1), but the word is used in the medical literature with different connotations, both in English and in other languages. This generates confusion in the medical literature, when the role of environment is discussed in the context of disease etiology. In particular, research on the role of environment in human carcinogenesis suffers from this ambiguity.

On the one hand, environment can encompass all non-genetic factors such as diet, lifestyle and infectious agents. In this broad sense, the environment is implicated in the causation of the majority of human cancers, as has been demonstrated since the 1960s (2). Such a broad meaning of the word environment is assumed when referring to ‘gene–environment interactions’. On the other hand, environmental factors can include only the (natural or man-made) agents and circumstances encountered by humans in . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Estimates of the fraction of cancer attributable to environmental factors
 
Lack of correspondence between risk and exposure prevalence data
Residual confounding in risk estimates
Relevance of past to present exposure circumstances
Errors in quantitative exposure–response models
Lack of consideration of effect modifiers

   A plea for caution
 

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 CarcinogenesisHome page
D. Mirabelli and E. Merler
'Environment' in cancer causation and etiological fraction: limitations and ambiguities
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 CarcinogenesisHome page
A. Pruss-Ustun and C. Corvalan
Reply to the recent article by Boffetta et al. [28(5):913 915] on attribution of cancer to the environment
Carcinogenesis, August 1, 2007; 28(8): 1849 - 1849.
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