This Common Environmental Exposure May Raise Childhood Leukemia Risk

Most people think about cancer risk in terms of genetics, smoking, alcohol, and diet. Fewer people think about the gas station down the street. Or the apartment that backs up to one. Or the daycare built beside a busy intersection.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that the places we move through every day shape our long-term health in ways we rarely notice immediately. I’m sure many of us saw the 2025 study1 that made the headlines, linking living near golf courses with a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease, likely tied to pesticide exposure drifting from the fairways. Now, a large new population study2 is drawing attention to another surprisingly ordinary exposure: living close to gas stations.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research, followed more than 824,000 children born in Quebec, Canada. Researchers used birth records and cancer registry data to examine whether proximity to gas stations at birth correlated with later childhood cancer risk.

Instead of relying on small case-control studies or asking families to remember past exposures, researchers built a population-wide cohort and tracked outcomes over time. They also adjusted for several major confounders, including traffic pollution, socioeconomic status, urban versus rural living, and neighborhood-level factors that could otherwise muddy the results.

The researchers used several different ways to estimate exposure. They looked at how many gas stations were within 250 meters of a child’s birth residence, how far the nearest station was, and a more nuanced calculation that weighted multiple nearby stations by distance.

Children born within 100 meters of a gas station showed the highest elevations in leukemia risk compared to children living farther away. And while some of the confidence intervals were wide, largely because childhood leukemia remains relatively rare, the direction of the findings aligned across nearly every model.

The likely culprit is benzene exposure. Benzene has been recognized as a human carcinogen for decades, particularly in relation to leukemia. Most of the evidence historically came from occupational settings where exposures were much higher, but scientists increasingly suspect that chronic low-level exposure during vulnerable developmental windows, including pregnancy and early childhood, may also matter.

This study does not mean every child living near a gas station will develop cancer. Childhood leukemia remains rare, and observational studies cannot prove direct causation. But this research adds to a broader shift happening in public health. Scientists are paying closer attention to how low-level environmental exposures accumulate across daily life.

And many of these exposures are surprisingly mundane.

We’ve spent years talking about wellness primarily through the lens of personal habits. What you eat. How often you exercise. Whether you meditate. But we can’t forget that our health is also shaped by the built environment around us, including the air we breathe, the pollutants near where we live, and the invisible chemical exposures woven into ordinary infrastructure.