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Volatile Hydrocarbon Exposures and Incident Coronary Heart Disease Events: Up to Ten Years of Follow-up among Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Workers
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Volatile Hydrocarbon Exposures and Incident Coronary Heart Disease Events: Up to Ten Years of Follow-up among Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Workers

Dazhe Chen, Dale P Sandler, Alexander P Keil, Gerardo Heiss, Eric A Whitsel, Jessie K Edwards, Patricia A Stewart, Mark R Stenzel, Caroline P Groth, Gurumurthy Ramachandran, …
Environmental health perspectives, v 131(5), pp 57006-57006
May 2023
PMID: 37224072
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Volatile Hydrocarbon Exposures and Incident Coronary Heart Disease Events: Up to Ten Years of Follow-up among Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Workers321.20 kBDownloadView
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https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP11859View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)access removed by US government, 1 Dec 2025 Restricted

Abstract

Benzene Coronary Disease - chemically induced Coronary Disease - epidemiology Follow-Up Studies Humans Myocardial Infarction Petroleum Pollution - adverse effects Prospective Studies Petroleum
During the 2010 ( ) disaster, response and cleanup workers were potentially exposed to toxic volatile components of crude oil. However, to our knowledge, no study has examined exposure to individual oil spill-related chemicals in relation to cardiovascular outcomes among oil spill workers. Our aim was to investigate the association of several spill-related chemicals [benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, -hexane (BTEX-H)] and total hydrocarbons (THC) with incident coronary heart disease (CHD) events among workers enrolled in a prospective cohort. Cumulative exposures to THC and BTEX-H across the cleanup period were estimated via a job-exposure matrix that linked air measurement data with self-reported spill work histories. We ascertained CHD events following each worker's last day of cleanup work as the first self-reported physician-diagnosed myocardial infarction (MI) or a fatal CHD event. We estimated hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals for the associations of exposure quintiles (Q) with risk of CHD. We applied inverse probability weights to account for bias due to confounding and loss to follow-up. We used quantile g-computation to assess the joint effect of the BTEX-H mixture. Among 22,655 workers with no previous MI diagnoses, 509 experienced an incident CHD event through December 2019. Workers in higher quintiles of each exposure agent had increased CHD risks in comparison with the referent group (Q1) of that agent, with the strongest associations observed in Q5 (range of ). However, most associations were nonsignificant, and there was no evidence of exposure-response trends. We observed stronger associations among ever smokers, workers with education, and workers with body mass index . No apparent positive association was observed for the BTEX-H mixture. Higher exposures to volatile components of crude oil were associated with modest increases in risk of CHD among oil spill workers, although we did not observe exposure-response trends. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP11859.

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Collaboration types
Industry collaboration
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Web of Science research areas
Environmental Sciences
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Toxicology
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