Studying the impact of early life exposures to pesticides on the risk of testicular germ cell tumors during adulthood (TESTIS project): study protocol

Abstract

BackgroundThe incidence of testicular germ cell tumors (TGCT), the most common cancer in men aged 15 to 45 years, has doubled over the last 30 years in developed countries. Reasons remain unclear but a role of environmental factors, especially during critical periods of development, is strongly suspected. Reliable data on environmental exposure during this critical time period are sparse. Little is known on whether it could be a combined effect of early and later-life exposures.Methods/DesignOur research aims to study the association between TGCT risk and pesticide exposures (domestic, occupational and environmental) during critical time periods of development and combined early and later-life exposures. The study design, developed during a 2-year pilot study, is a multicenter case–control study of 500 cases (ascertained through histology) and 1000 fertile/fecund controls recruited through 21 French ‘Centres d’Etude et de Conservation des Œufs et de Sperme humain’ (CECOS). Trained professional interviewers interview the subjects and their mothers by phone. Using a geographic information system developed and tested for application in this study design, environmental pesticides exposure assessment is based on life-time residential history. Occupational pesticides exposures are assessed by an industrial hygienist based on parents’ occupations and tasks. Exposures during the prenatal period, early childhood and puberty are focused. A blood sample is collected from each participant to assess genetic polymorphisms known to be associated with TGCT risk, as well as to explore gene-environment interactions.DiscussionThe results of our study will contribute to better understanding the causes of TGCT and the rapid increase of its incidence. We explore the effect of combined early and later-life pesticides exposure from multiple sources, as well as potential gene-environment interactions that have until now been rarely studied for TGCT. Our design allows future pooled studies and the bio-bank allows additional genetic or toxicological analyses.

Automatic Land Cover Reconstruction From Historical Aerial Images: An Evaluation of Features Extraction and Classification Algorithms

“…Tuning these values allow multiscale analysis. Common paired values are P = (8,16,24) and R = (1, 2, 3). The neighborhood of the LBP filter could be represented with discrete coordinates (i.e.…”

“…Its development was motivated by the will to provide a completed representation of texture patterns through an efficient low-dimensional feature vector. The LCoLBP filter consists in a concatenation of four histograms obtained with LBP-like filters, namely the FPLBP, XCSLBP, CSLBP and R-CRLBP (8). These filters have the particularity to highlight the use of the neighbors of a LBP neighborhood.…”

“…On the other hand, SqueezeNet was presented as a network able to obtain similar results with AlexNet while being computationally less demanding at inference. When used as feature extractors, these networks generate vectors of 500 (LeNet), 4096 (AlexNet, VGG-16), 512 (ResNet-18) and 86528 (SqueezeNet) 8 features.…”

“…As the relation between environmental exposures to pesticides and pathologies such as cancer are complex due to long latency, the characterization of longer term retrospective exposures is essential to understand the causes of the cancer. Large scale studies, like TESTEPERA [7] and TESTIS [8], have already highlighted the need to reconstruct the land cover from historical aerial images through the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Other studies used a combination of historical and actual land cover images for the analysis of the impact of the pesticides on the Parkinson disease [12]: The original historical land cover they used did not contain enough classes (i.e.…”

The puzzling incidence of testicular cancer in New Zealand: what can we learn?

“…Aside from fire‐fighting (Bates & Lane, ; Bates et al ., ; Stang et al ., ; LeMasters et al ., ; Ma et al ., ; Bates, ), other occupational exposures thought to be associated with TGCT development include plastic manufacturing, agricultural work and pesticide application (McGlynn & Trabert, ). With respect to the latter, a case–control study is underway in France which is explicitly focussed on the association between TGCT and early life pesticide exposure (the ‘TESTIS’ study) (Beranger et al ., ).…”