The Cancer Registry's offshore research group is awarded funding from the Research Council of Norway

Receives NOK 10 million for further research

Last updated: 8/15/2023

The Cancer Registry of Norway is well underway with several research projects investigating cause-specific cancer risk among employees in the oil and gas industry. The Cancer Registry of Norway, together with the Department of Biostatistics at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at UiO, has now been awarded NOK 10 million from the Research Council of Norway.

"Until now, the focus has been on cancer incidence, but in the future the focus will also be on the incidence of other diseases and injuries in connection with offshore work," says project manager Jo Stenehjem, researcher at the Cancer Registry of Norway and guest researcher at UiO.

Coordinate the project

A work package of NOK 3.3 million of the allocation will go to the Cancer Registry of Norway to establish a new cohort of offshore workers, conduct a survey, and merge data from the new cohort with an existing cohort from 1998. Read more about the Cancer Registry's offshore cohorts here.

The Cancer Registry of Norway will have a coordinating role for the new project and assist with resources in the form of data manager and project coordinator, in addition to research expertise.

Collaborates with partners from many countries

"We are very proud that so many national and international experts in fields such as occupational hygiene, occupational medicine, anaesthesia, traumatology, biostatistics and epidemiology support the project. It is particularly important that we now gather all national expertise at UiB and STAMI in exposure characterization and measurement of benzene to develop new exposure estimates for the period 2000-2020 for occupational categories in offshore petroleum activities," says Stenehjem. Experts from the Netherlands and the United States will assist in this work.

"In addition, our research group at UiO will be expanded with two research positions, one full-time and one part-time, which enables an expansion of our research focus in the future," says Stenehjem.