Last year, the world participated in the popular Ice Bucket Challenge to air support for the still untreatable disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Now, a new study has linked formaldehyde in the development of this paralyzing disease.
Researchers from Harvard School of Public Health say that men who breathe formaldehyde fumes as part of their work have tripled risk of developing ALS. In the study published in the Journal of Neurology & Psychiatry on Monday, funeral homes where embalming is rampant can pose serious health risks to their employees, reports NBC News.
"The study is important because, unfortunately, we know almost nothing about what causes ALS, which is 100% fatal within a very short time period," study author Andrea Roberts told Medscape Medical News.
Their findings have strengthened the link between formaldehyde or formalin and ALS. Andrea Roberts, research associate Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts and her colleagues have studied around 1.5 million people from 1973 until they died from the National Longitudinal Mortality Study (NLMS).
They were able to get the occupational data collected prospectively. Their occupational data were collated wherein formaldehyde exposure matrix, calculated intensity, and probability of exposure for each occupation were taken into consideration.
They discovered that men with a high probability of formaldehyde exposure were three times more likely to have died of ALS as men with no probable exposure. However, there were not enough women who have a job that has high risk of formaldehyde exposure to be able to calculate any risk.
"Our results should be interpreted cautiously. Jobs involving both high probability and high intensity of formaldehyde are relatively uncommon in the USA, and ALS is also rare; there were only two ALS deaths among men in such jobs," they wrote in their findings.