Environmental Risk Factors for AML
- Doctors can’t say for certain that any one environmental cause is behind someone’s AML diagnosis
- Several environmental factors, such as exposure to chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde, have been linked to an increased risk of developing the disease
- These are considered “driving factors” for increasing risk, not “causal factors”
There are, however, certain things in the environment that are considered “driving factors” for increasing the risk of the disease.
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“We don’t believe that there are factors that cause leukemia, but we believe that there are mutations accumulated from different environmental factors, on top of predisposing genes … that turn into leukemia,” Dr. Yaghmour says.
Some of those environmental factors that could contribute to disease development, according to Dr. Yaghmour, are radiation and chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde.
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