Use of Insecticide-Treated Bed Nets and Incidence of Burkitt Lymphoma

A partir d'une revue systématique de la littérature publiée entre 1990 et 2023 (23 études, 5 226 cas), cette méta-analyse évalue l'association entre le déploiement à grande échelle des moustiquaires imprégnées d'insecticide dans les années 2000 et l'incidence du lymphome de Burkitt chez les enfants d'Afrique subsaharienne

Résumé en anglais

Burkitt lymphoma (BL), first described by Dennis Burkitt in Uganda in 1958, appears to be associated with intense exposure to Plasmodium falciparum infection in areas where the infection is holoendemic, especially in children aged 5 to 10 years. Although P falciparum is not considered carcinogenic to humans per se, the geographic association between the incidence of malaria and that of BL suggests that malaria coinfection with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) may be an indirect risk factor for BL.While studies suggest that cumulative P falciparum infections at the population level and antimalarial antibody titers at the individual level are associated with the incidence of BL, Schmit et al embarked on a 2-step approach to assess whether the use of antimalarial insecticide–treated bed nets (ITNs) could have downstream beneficial effects for reducing the burden of BL. First, they sought to calculate pooled estimates of BL incidence in sub-Saharan African countries where malaria is endemic before and after the large-scale introduction of ITNs using retrievable data and to compare trends in BL incidence over time. Second, they investigated a possible association of mean ITN use at the population level with BL incidence in children and adolescents.