Re: Radon and Lung Cancer: What the studies really say.

[epirad@mchsi.com]

Unfortunately the treatment described uses the same problematic smoking data 

that does a poor job of predicting county lung cancer rates.  In ecologic 

studies, misclassification does not cancel but becomes magnified.  

> 

> On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Richard L. Hess wrote:

> 

> > At that point, wouldn't smoking per county be much more random and the

> > variations tend to cancel, other than broad regional preferences? Also, if

> > two neighboring counties had similar socio-economic backgrounds and

> > cultural tendencies, wouldn't smoking be similar in these as well?

> 

> 	--My treatment of smoking is far more detailed than you imply. It

> all boils down to the correlation between smoking prevalence and radon

> levels. In my data there is a strong negative correlation between the

> two, but not nearly strong enough to explain the discrepancy between my

> data and LNT. In fact I show that even a perfect negative correlation does

> not resolve the problem. All of the data I refer to are adjusted for

> differences in smoking prevalence using the BEIR IV prescription

> 

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