LONDON -- Trawler fishing on the high seas is Britain's most dangerous profession, according to a report published Friday in the country's leading medical journal.

Together with their colleagues in Britain's merchant navy, the fishermen ply a trade placing them at far greater risk of early death than those in other perilous jobs such as railway drivers and miners, the Lancet said.

"These results show that trawler fishing and merchant seafaring are still the two most dangerous occupations in Britain," the study's author, Stephen Roberts, from Oxford University says in the study.

More than 1,400 sailors met their deaths over a 20-year period stretching from 1976, with over a third of the cases put down to purely work-related accidents, the report said.

In the rest of the cases, the deaths had occurred as a result of illness, suicide, homicide, disappearances at sea or other unexplained reasons, it added.

Adverse weather conditions were regarded as the principal hazard facing those at sea causing the deaths of 115 fishermen over the period of the study, according to AFP. Roberts said that trawler fishermen had "to contend with unique occupational and weather related hazards."

The results confirm a longstanding view regarding the dangerous life faced by British seafarers. In 1885, a royal commission found that more than 10,000 seafarers had been killed in accidents between 1881 and 1883.