Fumento : The Radon Scare ( U of Iowa Radon Study )

[Chris Davey <chris.davey@cancerboard.ab.ca>]

This article was also published in The National Post, June 7th, page
A18, under the heading: "Radon: Don't believe the hype"

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [cdn-nucl-l] Fumento : The Radon Scare ( U of Iowa Radon
Study )
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2000 06:22:31 -0600
From: "Franta, Jaroslav" <frantaj@AECL.CA>
To: "'multiple'" <cdn-nucl-l@informer2.cis.McMaster.CA>


Interesting commentary on a recently published epidemiological study....

http://www.fumento.com/radonscare.html
The Radon Scare:
When Scientists Oppose Science
By Michael Fumento 
May 31, 2000
Copyright 2000 by Michael Fumento 

Once upon a time scientists, with few exceptions, could be relied upon to
help staunch the never-ending flow of scares-of-the-week emanating
from the
media and advocacy groups. But more and more, they're becoming part of the
problem. The pressure to publish a positive link between whatever's being
scrutinized and disease has simply become too intense. 
Myriad analyses have shown that a positive result in a disease study
is more
likely to be printed in a prestigious medical journal, (or in any medical
journal at all), to be published sooner, to get media publicity, and to
bring in additional grants upon which scientists depend. 
Researchers know this better than anyone, and increasingly they're
caving in
to the temptation to fudge their data. 
Case in point: A study in the June issue of the American Journal of
Epidemiology linking household exposure from naturally-occurring radon gas
to lung cancer. 
Sure enough, it's gotten lots of play, with headlines such as AP's
"University of Iowa Study Says Radon Greater Risk than Thought
Before." The
AP was right on, to hear Dr. Charles Lynch, University of Iowa
professor of
epidemiology and the study's principal investigator. 
"What this indicates is that residential radon exposure is a significant
cause of lung cancer," he said, backing up the EPA's assertion that nothing
else causes more lung cancer than cigarette smoking. 
But the authors' case is flimsier than the straw house of the first Little
Pig. 
True, the authors admitted, out of 12 published household studies looking
for a radon-lung cancer connection, this is only the second to find one.
Some have even found significant negative correlations. 
Ah, but this study was vastly superior, its authors told us. As the AP
stated, it "not only looked at overall radon levels in the participants'
homes, but at how much radon was present in different parts of homes
and how
much time people spent in those different areas." But no, it did not. It
could not. 
It was a retrospective study looking back 20 years. It thus invariably
suffered from a common epidemiological problem called "recall bias." 
Most of us can't be very specific about how much time we spent in what room
last week. But these people were required to search their memories
over a
period of two decades. Since many of the subjects were now dead, their
relatives were asked to answer the same questions! Obviously, this is as
scientific as palm reading. 
But wouldn't people err in both directions, with some lung cancer victims
understating their exposure to radon? 
No, the overwhelming tendency is for people with the disease any
disease to
"remember" higher exposures than people without it. 
Thus people have been asked in studies (I'm not kidding), "How many quarts
of chlorine-treated water did you drink daily 15 years ago?" They
tended to
give higher amounts if they had what was being researched, bladder cancer,
than those who were cancer-free. 
No true epidemiologist worthy of the title is unaware of the pitfalls of
recall bias. That the Iowa scientists ignored it is enough to
discredit them
and obliterate their study. But that was hardly their only scam. 
Another common trick among researchers desperate to find a positive result
is to cut the data in just the right way. Because cancer doesn't spread
itself out perfectly evenly in any given population, finding positive
results is never harder than cutting the overall group into sub-categories.
The Iowa researchers did this in at least two ways, as indicated in
one of
their tables in the journal article. First, they did show that if you looked
at all the people in the (allegedly) highest exposure group, there was no
statistically significant increase in lung cancers. But by excluding persons
now dead, the highest-exposure category of those left was barely in the
bounds of significance! Voila! Household radon is a killer. 
Yet even this wasn't enough to show statistical significance, and if you
don't show significance your results by definition cannot be positive. So
despite their reliance on recall bias and despite arbitrarily
excluding dead
persons, they still needed one more trick. They divided the study subjects
into five parts, ranging from lowest alleged exposure to highest. That makes
sense. And sure enough, they found no significant increase in the
lower four
parts, with a significant cancer correlation only in the highest
group. 
But that highest "fifth" wasn't a fifth at all; rather it was the top 15
percent. Although it's impossible to tell without looking at data they
didn't present, it appears that if they had fairly made that top
category a
full 20 percent, even with their other tricks they still wouldn't have found
statistical significance. 
And there you have it; by combining no less than three tricks the Iowa
scientists were able to convert what should have yet another study finding
no link between household radon exposure and cancer into one finding radon
to be a "significant cause." Sorry, but the only significant thing about
this study and its appearance in such a prestigious and peer-reviewed
medical journal is to answer a question posed by the title of a recent
editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine: "Is Academic Science for
Sale?" You'd better believe it. 
Read Michael Fumento's additional work on radon and on cancer. 


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Chris Davey
-- 
RSO / LSO Cross Cancer Institute 11560 University Avenue
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 1Z2
(780) 432-8616 fax 432-8615
email: cdavey@med.phys.ualberta.ca     chris.davey@cancerboard.ab.ca
pager number 005, just call (780) 432-8771 and ask for that pager
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