CLIC researchers Drs. Anssi Auvinen and Wafa Alimam, Tampere University-Finland, recently published a systematic review of studies on radioactive particles found in drinking water and cancer risk. Occasionally, naturally occurring radionuclides like uranium and radium can be ingested via food or water. These radionuclides are mostly excreted, but some can accumulate in tissues, potentially leading to internal radiation doses that can have lasting health effects. Our CLIC partners aimed to evaluate and summarize all the available epidemiological evidence in a systematic review, which identified a major research gap in this area.
The systematic review searched scientific databases for all primary studies that looked at the connection between exposure to radionuclides via drinking water and cancer (all types). They restricted the population to the general public and did not include studies about people with additional exposures through their occupation (like miners). Drs. Auvinen and Alimam found 29 studies about cancer risk and radionuclides (radium, uranium, and radon) in drinking water. They found that the majority of studies were not based on individual-level data and were too heterogeneous for pooled risk assessment, hindering accurate evaluation. The authors also noted that most studies suffered from methodological limitations and often failed to address polonium and radioactive lead, or to focus on tissues with the highest deposition of these radionuclides.
CLIC was created to let childhood cancer researchers from around the world conduct analyses on rare diseases by pooling multiple different studies. Like a systematic review, the pooled analysis method can be highly effective in overcoming the challenges of individual studies like small population size, statistical power, and scarce data. Drs. Auvinen and Alimam have contributed data from Finnish REgister-base Case-control study of Childhood LEukemia (FRECCLE) to many of our childhood cancer epidemiological pooled analyses.
Article Title: Cancer risk due to ingestion of naturally occurring radionuclides through drinking water: A systematic review
Authors: Alimam W, Auvinen A.
Published In: Sci Total Environ. 2025 Mar 10;968:178849. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.178849. Epub 2025 Feb 20. PMID: 39983494.
