Agricultural activities and risk of Alzheimer’s disease: the TRACTOR project, a nationwide retrospective cohort study

Abstract

Data regarding Alzheimer’s disease (AD) occurrence in farming populations is lacking. This study aimed to investigate whether, among the entire French farm manager (FM) workforce, certain agricultural activities are more strongly associated with AD than others, using nationwide data from the TRACTOR (Tracking and monitoring occupational risks in agriculture) project. Administrative health insurance data (digital electronic health/medical records and insurance claims) for the entire French agricultural workforce, over the period 2002–2016, on the entire mainland France were used to estimate the risk of AD for 26 agricultural activities with Cox proportional hazards model. For each analysis (one for each activity), the exposed group included all FMs that performed the activity of interest (e.g. crop farming), while the reference group included all FMs who did not carry out the activity of interest (e.g. FMs that never farmed crops between 2002 and 2016). There were 5067 cases among 1,036,069 FMs who worked at least one year between 2002 and 2016. Analyses showed higher risks of AD for crop farming (hazard ratio (HR) = 3.72 [3.47–3.98]), viticulture (HR = 1.29 [1.18–1.42]), and fruit arboriculture (HR = 1.36 [1.15–1.62]). By contrast, lower risks of AD were found for several animal farming types, in particular for poultry and rabbit farming (HR = 0.29 [0.20–0.44]), ovine and caprine farming (HR = 0.50 [0.41–0.61]), mixed dairy and cow farming (HR = 0.46 [0.37–0.57]), dairy farming (HR = 0.67 [0.61–0.73]), and pig farming (HR = 0.30 [0.18–0.52]). This study shed some light on the association between a wide range of agricultural activities and AD in the entire French FMs population.