[ RadSafe ] 'How Low Doses Of Radiation Can Cause Heart DiseaseAnd Stroke'

[Brennan, Mike (DOH)]

My apologies: an inherent weakness of the media.  If we had been face-to-face you would have seen a slight quirking of the corners of my mouth, indicating a moderate level of tongue-in-cheek.  

I recognize that there is indeed nothing like good enough data readily available to account for, or possibly even identify, all of the confounding factors.  In the United States we don't even have a truly comprehensive death registry, let alone a centralized health records database (and it is not readily apparent that the proposed database will allow for this kind of data-mining).  

Add to this the possibility that there might ACTUALLY be different risk/advantages to particular exposures in different populations and in regard to different health effects (different types of cancer, pathogens, autoimmune conditions, stress reactions, etc.), I suspect that the data would have to be modeled in a 20-or-30 dimension space, making trend spotting a challenge.

-----Original Message-----
From: דב בריקנר [mailto:brickner at smile.net.il] 
Sent: Saturday, October 24, 2009 2:44 AM
To: Brennan, Mike (DOH); 'Radsafe'
Subject: RE: [ RadSafe ] 'How Low Doses Of Radiation Can Cause Heart DiseaseAnd Stroke'

"Fairly easy"?????? "Once all confounding issues are accounted for"...
Indeed  it is a very complicated study  to perform. In an ecological design
you can not account for confounders and in a cohort study or even in a case
control study one can not rely on computerized registries to include even
the most basic confounders like smoking status or family history or co-
morbidity like hypertension... Actually those factors are much more
significant than low dose radiation exposure...

Dov Brickner   MD  
Beer Sheva Israel

Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl] On Behalf
Of Brennan, Mike (DOH)
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 8:48 PM
To: Radsafe
Subject: RE: [ RadSafe ] 'How Low Doses Of Radiation Can Cause Heart
DiseaseAnd Stroke'

This should be fairly easy to verify by looking at long term residents
of areas with different background levels, and seeing if there is a
trend, once all confounding issues are accounted for.