Friday, Mar 29, 2024 | Last Update : 01:10 PM IST

  Newsmakers   Graduates at higher brain tumour risk

Graduates at higher brain tumour risk

PTI
Published : Jun 22, 2016, 1:35 am IST
Updated : Jun 22, 2016, 1:35 am IST

Chances of glioma in women 23% higher than men, claims new study.

Brain tumour
 Brain tumour

Chances of glioma in women 23% higher than men, claims new study.

People with at least three years of higher education are at greater risk for cancerous brain tumours than those with no more than nine years of schooling, perplexed researchers said Tuesday.

“There is a 19 per cent increased risk that university-educated men could be diagnosed with glioma,” said Amal Khanolkar, a scientist at the Institute of Child Health in London and lead author of a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community.

For women, he said, the risk rose by 23 per cent. “It was a surprising result which is difficult to explain,” Khanolkar told AFP. Concretely, the increase in risk is minimal because such brain tumours are rare.

At the lowest level of education, the chances of glioma were reported at five in 3,000. At the other end of the educational spectrum, the odds increased to six in 3,000.

But the question remained as to whether the gap — no matter how small — was real and, if so, what caused it.

Earlier research exploring a possible link between education or social level, on the one hand, and the frequency of brain tumours, on the other, had been inconclusive. To “put to rest” these conflicting findings, Khanolkar and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute medical university in Stockholm used a new approach.

Rather than comparing a small number of brain tumour patients with healthy individuals, they sifted through the health records of 4.3 million adults tracked by the Swedish public health system from 1993 to 2011.

The researchers distinguished between three kinds of brain tumours — two of them non-cancerous — with different causes.

The strong link between education level and tumour incidence held for all three types, but was strongest for deadly gliomas.

Interestingly, an even higher risk gap was found between low-income manual labourers and high-income men and women who did not work with their hands.

Gliomas are malignant brain tumours which grow rapidly and cause severe symptoms, including migraines, nausea and memory loss. The survival rate is very low.

The study did not seek to explain the link between higher education and tumours, nor did it consider the potential impact of environmental and lifestyle factors, such as smoking or alcohol consumption.

The most common explanation for risk levels that rise with years spent in the classroom is that people with a higher education or income “have a better awareness of symptoms,” Khanolkar said.

Location: France, Île-de-France, Paris