Childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in relation to population mixing around the time of birth in south Hungary

In a retrospective epidemiological study of 481,984 live births in South Hungary, we investigated whether higher levels of population mixing around the time of birth is a risk factor for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) under age 5 years. Poisson regression was used to investigate the relationship between risk of ALL and the population-mixing index based on the number of incomers in each county district for each year, standardized to have a range of 0-1. Among all children, the risk of ALL increased significantly with increasing population mixing around the time of birth (trend across the range of 0-1 RR = 2.1 95% CI: 1.02-4.44). This effect was more marked for boys (RR=3.1 95% CI: 1.13-8.51), which supports a sex-specific effect of exposures on risk of ALL.