Re: LNT models -Constancy of Radon levels over time??

[Bernard L Cohen <blc+@pitt.edu>]

On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Michael McNaughton wrote:

> At 01:41 PM 3/8/00 -0600, you wrote:
> >How would you design a study to examine the risk posed by residential radon?
> >How would you test the validity of the LNT?
> 
> These are excellent questions. Challenging questions require an unusual
> approach, as follows.
> 
> 1. Because we are looking for small effects, it is essential to study a
> large population, e.g., 100 million people or more, but we have to avoid
> the ecological fallacy.
> 
> 2. Because we don't have the resources to collect complete data about such
> a large population, we compile as much data as possible. At a minimum, we
> compile the means AND the distributions about the mean for all the relevant
> variables such as smoking, radon, and lung cancer. Whatever data we have on
> correlations will be valuable but not essential.
> 
> 3. We generate a very large data base (several gigabytes) to represent 100
> million hypothetical people, and allow the computer to adjust the details,
> subject to the constraints of the data we have compiled. For example,
> because we do not know how the variables correlate for each individual
> person, we allow the computer to vary the correlations, subject to the
> constraints of the data.
> 
> 4. We program the computer with a hypothetical model (such as the BEIR
> model) to predict the incidence of lung cancer as a function of the
> variables. The computer program adjusts the model AND the correlations to
> produce the best fit to the data. If the model were perfect, the
> uncertainty would be limited only by counting statistics. In practice, the
> closer the model comes to this ideal, the better it is.

	--This comes very close to a description of my study. However, I
object to the implication that the computer makes decisions; it only
follows our instructions, reducing the calculational labor.
 
Bernard L. Cohen
Physics Dept.
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Tel: (412)624-9245
Fax: (412)624-9163
e-mail: blc+@pitt.edu


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