Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 375

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 19 of the 19 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Nitrate in drinking water and colorectal cancer risk: A nationwide population‐based cohort study

Open access
Schullehner, Jörg, Hansen, Birgitte, Thygesen, Malene, Pedersen, Carsten B., Sigsgaard, Torben·2018·International Journal of Cancer

Abstract

Nitrate in drinking water may increase risk of colorectal cancer due to endogenous transformation into carcinogenic N‐nitroso compounds. Epidemiological studies are few and often challenged by their limited ability of estimating long‐term exposure on a detailed individual level. We exploited population‐based health register data, linked in time and space with longitudinal drinking water quality data, on an individual level to study the association between long‐term drinking water nitrate exposure and colorectal cancer (CRC) risk. Individual nitrate exposure was calculated for 2.7 million adults based on drinking water quality analyses at public waterworks and private wells between 1978 and 2011. For the main analyses, 1.7 million individuals with highest exposure assessment quality were included. Follow‐up started at age 35. We identified 5,944 incident CRC cases during 23 million person‐years at risk. We used Cox proportional hazards models to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) of nitrate exposure on the risk of CRC, colon and rectal cancer. Persons exposed to the highest level of drinking water nitrate had an HR of 1.16 (95% CI: 1.08–1.25) for CRC compared with persons exposed to the lowest level. We found statistically significant increased risks at drinking water levels above 3.87 mg/L, well below the current drinking water standard of 50 mg/L. Our results add to the existing evidence suggesting increased CRC risk at drinking water nitrate concentrations below the current drinking water standard. A discussion on the adequacy of the drinking water standard in regards to chronic effects is warranted.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1002/ijc.31306

Cites

19 of 19 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 19 references

Cited by

See all 375

Metadata

Authors
Schullehner, J., Hansen, B., Thygesen, M., Pedersen, C. B., & Sigsgaard, T.
Venue
International Journal of Cancer
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2018-02-23
Volume
143
Issue
1
Pages
73-79
ISSN
  • 0020-7136 (ISSN-L)
  • 1097-0215
OpenAlex
W2793240808
Cited by
375
References
19
FWCI
13.96
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Nitrate in drinking water and colorectal cancer risk: A nationwide population‐based cohort study. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1002/ijc.31306
The paper
Schullehner, J., Hansen, B., Thygesen, M., Pedersen, C. B., & Sigsgaard, T. (2018). Nitrate in drinking water and colorectal cancer risk: A nationwide population‐based cohort study. International Journal of Cancer. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijc.31306

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.