Maternal occupational exposure to ionizing radiation and major structural birth defects

Abstract

Background: Ionizing radiation (IR) is known to be carcinogenic and mutagenic, but little is known about the association between maternal occupational exposure to IR and birth defects.

Methods: We studied 38,009 mothers who participated in the National Birth Defects Prevention Study and delivered between 1997 and 2009. We assessed odds ratios [ORs] for the association between maternal occupations with potential exposure to IR and 39 birth defects.

Results: We observed significant odds ratios (ORs) for isolated hydrocephaly (adjusted OR [AOR], 2.1; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.1-4.2), isolated anotia/microtia (AOR, 2.0; 95% CI, 1.0-4.0), isolated colonic atresia (crude OR, 7.5; 95% CI, 2.5-22.3), isolated omphalocele (AOR, 2.3; 95% CI, 1.1-4.6) and isolated anencephaly (crude OR, 0.23; 95% CI, 0.06-0.94). We also observed a nonsignificant OR for birth defects in aggregate (AOR, 2.0; 95% CI, 0.9-4.6) among mothers with potential occupational exposure to fluoroscopy.

Conclusion: We assessed 39 birth defects, observing that maternal occupations with potential exposure to IR were associated with a significantly increased risk for 4 birth defects and a significantly protected risk for 1 birth defect. These results should be interpreted cautiously because our measurement of exposure is qualitative, some of these associations may be due to occupational exposures that are correlated with IR and some may be due to chance. However, these findings serve as the first evaluation of these relationships in a large study and may be useful for generating hypotheses for future studies.

Keywords: anencephaly; anotia; birth defects; colon atresia; fluoroscopy; hydrocephalus; ionizing radiation; occupational; omphalocele.