Re: Mossman paper in Health Physics News - The Debate is Over

[epirad@mchsi.com]

Dr. Cohen, You wrote - Am I correct in assuming that is what you mean?



No, you are not correct, I gave these examples below not the ones you stated 

(see below) -  



I have offered (since 1999) a plausible explanantion for your findings.       



In the previous email I pointed out that - your smoking data is co-correlated

with socioeconomic status, poor health care, apartment living, mobility, lower

education status, etc.  You have never assessed all these variables in a

multivariate analyses.  And in fact, this would be impossible to do adequately

because of the non linear relationships between these factors within and

between counties.



If you do not feel it is plausible, which scientists do you recommend we have 

review whether or not this is a plausible explanation?



You have not answered others questions regarding whether you would accept the 

NCRPs opinion on whether or not your poor smoking data in large part explains 

your finings.   We previously pointed out the poor predictive ability of your 

smoking data to explain lung cancers.  Puskin has further shown your inverse 

association is also found for other smoking related cancers.  It is pretty 

clear that you have residual confounding from smoking and the confounding is 

enhanced by factors co-correlated to smoking.   



I understand your "treatments", but disagree that you can validly use 

additional faulty summary data to "treat" your existing summary data.  



Bill Field

> On Fri, 6 Jun 2003 epirad@mchsi.com wrote:

> 

> > In the previous email I pointed out that - your smoking data is co-correlated

> > with socioeconomic status, poor health care, apartment living, mobility, lower

> > education status, etc.  You have never assessed all these variables in a

> > multivariate analyses.  And in fact, this would be impossible to adequately

> > because of the non linear relationships between these factors within and

> > between counties.

> 

> 	--The basic equation for my study is the following relationship

> between lung cancer rates corrected for smoking prevalence, M, and radon

> exposure, r, for U.S. counties:

> 	M = A + B r

> where A is close to 1.0 and according to LNT, B =+7.3 (in percent

> per/pCi/L)> If you do not agree to this, that is another issue.

> 	The issue you raise here is that there may be confounding factors

> that correlate strongly, for unrelated reasons, with M and with r. As an

> example, there may be pollutants X, Y, and Z that correlate with M because



> they cause lung cancer or because they stimulate the desire to smoke. For

> some unrecognized reason, they may scavenge radon out of the air in homes.

> Thus, counties with high levels of these pollutants would tend to have

> high lung cancer and low radon levels, and vice versa. Am I correct in

> assuming that is what you mean?

> 	This issue is addressed in Item #7 on my web site, in Section 3,

> where it is shown that the existence of confounding factors with the

> required correlations with both M and r is extremely implausible. If you

> read and understand the treatments in that section and have reservations

> about them, please let me know so we can discuss them. If you do not

> understand them, please ask for explanations on specific point

************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/