Radon in Devon and Cornwall and paediatric malignancies

Thorne, R; Foreman, Nicholas; Mott, M. G.

doi:10.1016/0959-8049(95)00523-4

Cited by 25 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Other ecological studies bearing on the same problems generally could not confirm Henshaw's results. All these investigations were conducted in the UK with partly overlapping data [20,25,26,27,28,29]; case-control studies such as the one of Wakefield and Kohler [24] or of Stjernfeldt et al [30], which found no association for any type of malignancy, suffered from the same small-sample sizes (15 and 40 cases, respectively). Neither Lubin et al [11] nor we were able to find any association between radon exposure and acute childhood leukaemia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Childhood cancer and residential radon exposure - results of a population-based case-control study in Lower Saxony (Germany)

Kaletsch

Kaatsch

Meinert

et al. 1999

Radiation and Environmental Biophysics

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A population-based case-control study on risk factors for childhood malignancies was used to investigate a previously reported association between elevated indoor radon concentrations and childhood cancer, with special regard to leukaemia. The patients were all children suffering from leukaemia and common solid tumours (nephroblastoma, neuroblastoma, rhabdomyosarcoma, central nervous system (CNS) tumours) diagnosed between July 1988 and June 1993 in Lower Saxony (Germany) and aged less than 15 years. Two population-based control groups were matched by age and gender to the leukaemia patients. Long-term (1 year) radon measurements were performed in those homes where the children had been living for at least 1 year, with particular attention being paid to those rooms where they had stayed most of the time. Due to the sequential study design, radon measurements in these rooms could only be done for 36% (82 leukaemias, 82 solid tumours and 209 controls) of the 1038 families initially contacted. Overall mean indoor radon concentrations (27 Bq m(-3)) were low compared with the measured levels in other studies. Using a prespecified cutpoint of 70 Bq m(-3), no association with indoor radon concentrations was seen for the leukaemias (odds ratio (OR): 1.30; 95% confidence interval (95% CI): 0.32-5.33); however, the risk estimates were elevated for the solid tumours (OR: 2.61; 95% CI: 0.96-7.13), mainly based on 6 CNS tumours. We did not find any evidence for an association between indoor radon and childhood leukaemia, which is in line with a recently published American case-control study. There is little support for an association with CNS tumours in the literature.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Childhood cancer and residential radon exposure - results of a population-based case-control study in Lower Saxony (Germany)

Kaletsch

Kaatsch

Meinert

et al. 1999

Radiation and Environmental Biophysics

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“…Other negative studies (Muirhead et al, 1991;Miller et al, 1993) highlight problems of potential confounding when data are based on large units of analysis such as at the regional or country level. A more recent study by Thorne et al (1996) found no difference in overall childhood cancer rates in postcode sectors of England with 'high' and 'low' radon levels. High radon areas, however, had significantly increased rates of neuroblastoma (P = 0.02) and a non-significant increase in childhood AML (P = 0.11).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indoor residential radon exposure and risk of childhood acute myeloid leukaemia

et al. 1999

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Summary Exposure to radon has been identified as a risk factor for lung cancer in uranium miners, but evidence of adverse health effects due to indoor radon exposure is inconsistent. Ecological studies have suggested a correlation between indoor radon levels and leukaemia incidence. We evaluated the risk associated with indoor residential radon exposure within a larger interview-based case-control study of risk factors for childhood acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). A total of 173 cases and 254 controls met the eligibility criteria, and information was collected through telephone interviews with parents and analysis of alpha-track radon detectors placed in the home for a period of 1 year. No association was observed between radon exposure and risk of AML, with adjusted odds ratios of 1.2 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.7-1.8) for 37-100 Bq m -3 and 1.1 (95% CI 0.6-2.0) for > 100 Bq m -3 compared with < 37 Bq m -3. Although there was an inverse association between radon level and AML risk among children < 2 years at diagnosis, among children ≥2 years, AML risk was increased among those with higher radon exposure. The observed association after age 2 is most likely due to chance. Overall, there was no association between residential radon and risk of childhood AML.

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“…Using Poisson regression, Viel [34] also reported a negative association between radon and ALL in an ecologic study which accounted for such covariates as socio-economic status (estimated by the percentage of workmen in the employed population), a linear geographical gradient (expressed in terms of latitude and longitude for each area), and indoor gamma rays. In another study that examined radon exposure and childhood ALL at the postcode sector level in the UK counties of Devon and Cornwall, Thorne et al [43] reported a non-significant ( p-value = 0.28) reduced risk for those exposed to higher radon levels ( 100 Bq/m 3 ) as compared to lower levels (<100 Bq/m 3 ). Haque and Kirik [44], employing linear regression on data from the UK, also found a positive, but non-significant, correlation between radon concentration and ALL.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Iowa radon leukaemia study: a hierarchical population risk model for spatially correlated exposure measured with error

Smith

Zhang

Field

2007

Statistics in Medicine

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This paper presents a Bayesian model that allows for the joint prediction of county-average radon levels and estimation of the associated leukaemia risk. The methods are motivated by radon data from an epidemiologic study of residential radon in Iowa that include 2726 outdoor and indoor measurements. Prediction of county-average radon is based on a geostatistical model for the radon data which assumes an underlying continuous spatial process. In the radon model, we account for uncertainties due to incomplete spatial coverage, spatial variability, characteristic differences between homes, and detector measurement error. The predicted radon averages are, in turn, included as a covariate in Poisson models for incident cases of acute lymphocytic (ALL), acute myelogenous (AML), chronic lymphocytic (CLL), and chronic myelogenous (CML) leukaemias reported to the Iowa cancer registry from 1973 to 2002. Since radon and leukaemia risk are modelled simultaneously in our approach, the resulting risk estimates accurately reflect uncertainties in the predicted radon exposure covariate. Posterior mean (95 per cent Bayesian credible interval) estimates of the relative risk associated with a 1 pCi/L increase in radon for ALL, AML, CLL, and CML are 0.91 (0.78-1.03), 1.01 (0.92-1.12), 1.06 (0.96-1.16), and 1.12 (0.98-1.27), respectively.

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Radon in Devon and Cornwall and paediatric malignancies

Cited by 25 publications

References 13 publications

Childhood cancer and residential radon exposure - results of a population-based case-control study in Lower Saxony (Germany)

Childhood cancer and residential radon exposure - results of a population-based case-control study in Lower Saxony (Germany)

Indoor residential radon exposure and risk of childhood acute myeloid leukaemia

Iowa radon leukaemia study: a hierarchical population risk model for spatially correlated exposure measured with error

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