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Monday, July 15, 2013

The Power Of Large Numbers

Is demonstrated in this cohort study of Australians who received CT scans.

With more people in the exposed population, we get to discern excess cancers at lower and lower excess doses.  Here people with one scan received an average of 4.5 mSv.

The exposed cohort was around 680,000 roughly 3 times the Japanese a-bomb survivor exposed cohort.

Thanks to Conrad Mayhew for the link.

7 comments:

  1. This is an impressive piece of work. And besides what it says about LNT (that graph screams LNT!), it also illustrates one usefulness of 'socialized medicine', i.e., an actually functioning national health care system ;-)

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  2. These newest pieces of evidence for LNT are worth sharing, so thanks for posting :)
    BTW, your post is now out in twitterland:
    https://twitter.com/ConradMayhew/status/357015731646369792

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  3. BTW are there any other strong studies besides the Chernobyl thyroid cancer in children studies demonstrating LNT for low-dose, low-dose-rate exposure? These CT exposures while being given over many years nevertheless are short bursts each.

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  4. There is a Chernobyl worker leukemia study, radon studies, the Mayak population study, etc. all of which have large numbers of exposed populations which show LNT. Of course, there will always be a statistical threshold dose below which we can't say with 90+% certainty that there is an excess of cancer.

    A study with a really large exposed population and low-dose, low dose-rate exposures is the One Million Worker Study. It is still ongoing: http://www.onemillionworkerstudy.org/

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  5. Same here, thanks a lot for the One Million Worker Study! I had not heard of it, it's amazing!

    In case you feel like reading some more, here are some recent papers with a section on occupational exposure / protracted exposure:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0952-4746/33/1/1
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1667/RR1884.1
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0952-4746/32/3/E02
    There are so many, I just picked a few open-access ones here.

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