This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Cosmic radiation associated with risk of cataract in pilots

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

Airline pilots are three times more likely to develop nuclear cataracts than nonpilots, according to a recently published study. The increased risk is related to cumulative exposure to cosmic radiation, the study suggests.

Vilhjalmur Rafnsson, MD, PhD, and colleagues in Iceland conducted a population-based case-control study of this phenomenon in 445 men, of whom 274 had one of four types of lens opacity; 71 had nuclear cataracts, 102 had cortical lens opacification, 69 had central optical zone involvement and 32 had posterior subcapsular lens opacification. Control subjects were those who did not have lens opacification or who had a different type of opacification. Seventy-nine of the study subjects were commercial airline pilots. The rest were drawn from the local population.

Exposure to cosmic radiation was assessed based on employment time as pilots, annual number of hours flown on each aircraft type, timetables, flight profiles and individual cumulative radiation doses as calculated by a software program.

After adjustment for age, smoking status and sunbathing habits, the odds ratio for nuclear cataracts was 3.02 for pilots vs. nonpilots, the study authors said.

Pilots whose regular flight patterns took them close to the geographic poles, such as those flying North Atlantic routes, were at a greater risk of developing cataract than those who had southern routes, said one of the researchers, quoted in an article on the Web site health.telegraph. According to Dr. Rafnsson, as quoted in that article, someone flying at 36,000 feet is subject to cosmic radiation at about 100 times more intensity than at sea level.

“This is the first published case-control study of lens opacification involving commercial pilots, adjusted for age and individual risk factors for cataracts,” the study authors said. “Our results indicate that cosmic radiation may be a causative factor in nuclear cataract among commercial airline pilots.”

The study is published in the August issue of Archives of Ophthalmology.