Professor Meredith Franklin published Outdoor artificial light at night, air pollution, and risk of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia in the California Linkage Study of Early-Onset Cancers in Scientific Reports. An excerpt of the paper is below.
Leukemia is the most common type of cancer in children (age 0–14 years), accounting for approximately one third of all cancers in this age group1. The most common subtype (80%) of childhood leukemia is acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), which is a disease of the immune system caused in part by mutations that occur during the division of blood cells2. While several genetic germline alleles and somatic alterations have been linked to the development of childhood ALL (e.g. ETV6-RUNX1, high hyperdiploidy), a large majority of cases do not have a dominant genetic component and may be attributable, at least in part, to environmental exposures. Several environmental exposures such as air pollution, radiation, and pesticide use have been previously associated with increased risk of childhood ALL3. Outdoor artificial light at night (ALAN), another environmental risk factor, has been linked to adult hematologic malignancies and circadian disruption4,5,6, but has yet to be extensively studied in childhood cancers.