[HN Gopher] Low dose radiation cancer 2x worse than predicted by...
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Low dose radiation cancer 2x worse than predicted by LNT model
Author : pfdietz
Score : 142 points
Date : 2023-08-18 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bmj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bmj.com)
| m_dupont wrote:
| Yeah the title here really overstates the strength of the
| conclusions.
|
| Didn't read every table in the paper but they clearly state that
| a linear fit was parsimonious with the data, and adding quadratic
| and exponential terms only modestly improved the performance but
| neither even had a p-value of less than 0.05 (I am aware that
| overreliance on p-values is a bit of an issue, but nonetheless).
|
| Its also easy to see from the graph in the paper that the linear
| fit goes through all the error bars.
|
| * edit / Disclaimer: only skim-read the article, I should be
| working right now
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I'm extremely suspicious of xray machines at the dentist and the
| doctors office. I refuse any xray that isnt absolutely vital.
| Medical professionals do them as a box checking exercise to
| prevent mal practice law suits, but they are largely useless.
| They do catch issues, but if you are young and healthy, the
| radiation risk is definitely there.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Another reason to be more injury avoidant than most young
| people usually are! I have lots of friends who sometimes have
| to go to the doctor for a sprain or hairline fracture or
| something, often from sports.
|
| It just doesn't seem worth it to do stuff like volleyball or
| any high impact sport.
| nradov wrote:
| Fractures are very rare in volleyball. High impact sports
| such as weightlifting are critical for bone health and
| building skeletal muscle. Lack of bone density and
| insufficient muscle are certainly more dangerous than an
| occasional x-ray.
|
| https://peterattiamd.com/ama37/
|
| I do agree with avoiding sports that have a high risk of
| concussions due to head impacts.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Lots of people seem to make it to old age, still being
| almost as healthy and active as an average young person,
| sans any broken bones, without lifting much of anything
| heavy or playing any sports, they seem to just do causal
| swimming or hiking or tai chi or something.
|
| And there are gym rats who have a life of all kinds of
| random aches and pains despite being very strong, then have
| heart attacks, so I'm super confused on what you're
| actually supposed to do, but it definitely seems like
| there's a limit to how much people really need for close to
| optimal health.
|
| The science seems pretty clear that having muscle is better
| for your health, but it seems really hard to figure out how
| much is actually needed, and whether someone who's already
| reasonably in shape from walking and doing projects
| actually needs any lifting outside the "near zero injury
| chance and you probably won't be sore tomorrow" range for
| maximum health issues prevention.
| nradov wrote:
| There is certainly a genetic component to bone health,
| but on average most people aren't able to build up enough
| bone mineral density and skeletal muscle without lifting
| heavy weights. You're dreaming if you believe you can get
| in shape by walking and doing some casual projects (heavy
| manual labor is another story). Beyond a certain age it
| becomes essentially impossible to build those up, and
| then you start gradually declining year by year. Do you
| want to spend the last years of your life crippled
| because you fell down the stairs and broke a hip?
|
| In order to figure out how much muscle is needed, decide
| what you want to be able to do when you're old and then
| work backwards from there.
|
| https://peterattiamd.com/how-to-train-for-the-
| centenarian-de...
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I understood LNT is already considered to be too pessimistic at
| low dose. Would this mean it is in fact optimistic? And low dose
| radiation is actually quite bad?
| pfdietz wrote:
| [flagged]
| kortex wrote:
| I think the main takeaway is we probably should not put too
| much stock in a linear-time-invariant-cumulative model of
| radiation mapping to cancer risk. Sure it's the easiest to
| calculate, but that's the streetlamp search fallacy.
|
| It's far more likely that the shape of the radiation dose curve
| matters quite a bit on how the body responds. E.g. the
| difference between 10 discrete 1 Gy events, vs one 10 Gy event,
| vs 10 Gy absorbed over a year.
| csours wrote:
| This is something I don't understand about sunburn - If I'm
| exposed to 15 minutes straight of sunlight, I will burn, but
| in 2-5 minute chunks spread out over several hours, I can
| tolerate much more.
|
| Is there an equation for this? Like a small coefficient with
| a high power? 0.1*Te^4 ?
|
| Or am I wrong about how sunburn works?
|
| This one just shows time as a straight factor, no exponent:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6345802/#:~:tex.
| ...
| peteradio wrote:
| Saturation. This impacts so many different systems. You
| can't really model it with simple polynomials, it requires
| step functions.
| [deleted]
| paulmd wrote:
| I really dislike the way various "skeptic" communities tend to
| rally around "X thing is safe/maybe actually good". Like global
| warming is another example.
|
| Science already tends to be very conservative and build a lot of
| bias towards the null hypothesis. And then amateur skeptics take
| that and add even further bias towards null/maybe-actually-good.
| Maybe global warming will make the plants grow better (no), maybe
| it won't do anything at all (no)!
|
| These very faint studies around things like radiation hormesis
| get blown into loud dissent that "maybe radiation actually
| good?". But god forbid you ask them to wear a mask to prevent the
| spread of a deadly disease, they want to see long-term studies in
| triplicate with massive p-factors.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| > But god forbid you ask them to wear a mask to prevent the
| spread of a deadly disease, they want to see long-term studies
| in triplicate with massive p-factors.
|
| That's a strange example to use to try to back up your
| argument, especially considering the data and observations we
| now have available to us.
|
| It's scientifically established at this point that those who
| questioned masking were absolutely correct: masking did not
| have a significant preventative, nor even mitigative, impact on
| case counts.
|
| What might be among some of the largest and most extensive
| scientific experiments ever performed confirm this.
|
| For example, tens of millions of people across Canada were
| forced to mask for well over a year in most regions, and two
| straight years in Toronto (the fourth-most populous city in
| North America).
|
| Yet, despite masking being universal in public for an extended
| duration, there were multiple significant increases and
| decreases in case counts over time in such regions.
|
| Had masking been effective at preventing, or even just
| mitigating, the spread, then those observed case count
| fluctuations would not have happened to begin with.
|
| Even scientific observation as basic as watching masked
| individuals outdoors in colder autumn and winter temperatures
| showed why masking was ineffective: notable and visible clouds
| of water vapour would be expelled with each breath the masked
| individuals took, despite the masks supposedly limiting or
| preventing that from happening.
|
| For most of the widely-used masks, and even respirators as
| commonly worn, the vapour would often be concentrated as it
| exited the mask and was directed through gaps where it
| contacted the wearer's face.
|
| In busier urban settings, this would effectively expose those
| in the vicinity to a concentrated dose of another individual's
| breath. Masks that didn't prevent egress of such vapour also
| didn't prevent ingress.
|
| The same effect was happening indoors, and during warmer
| conditions, but just not as easily observable as during colder
| temperatures.
|
| So, it's scientifically established at this point that there is
| no epidemiological nor physical basis to support masking.
|
| Maybe there's a better example you could have found to support
| your argument.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| My parents have owned homes and grown many food plants in many
| cold coastal climates near water (let's say Oregon) and in hot
| valley climates (ca central valley) where there is definitely
| less water.
|
| Things grow much better in the warmer area, but you have to
| water like crazy.
|
| I personally do wonder if we couldn't grow food where the water
| is, if only those areas weren't as cold as they currently are.
| Obviously makes you wonder if the rainfall in those areas would
| still stay.
| Retric wrote:
| Cold northern climates are cold because they get less
| sunlight which then translates into lower temperatures.
| Simply increasing temperature wouldn't provide more sunlight
| in the spring and fall which means the growing seasons don't
| actually expand nearly as much as you might think.
|
| Also, we can grow stuff as far north as Canada while the
| equator runs though South America. People used to Mercator
| projections get a wildly incorrect view of what earth's
| surface looks like, but in reality the loss of farmland
| wildly outweighs any possible gains.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| It can't just be the sun. Growing tomatoes in a yard in
| Marin even has different time tables and IMO yield than it
| does in the valley just east of it.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Yeah it's not just available sunlight, though that is a
| significant one.
|
| Another factor in plant growth is that chemical reactions
| happen "faster" the greater the temperature. While
| temperature doesn't have as an extreme direct effect on
| plants as it does microbes, the effect is still
| absolutely there.
| peteradio wrote:
| Why do you think a skeptic of one thing automatically
| subscribes them to all skeptical theories?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Of those who speak their views on such things they are often
| very well correlated.
| peteradio wrote:
| So what? I'm not really seeing the relation of masks to
| radiation, those are two orthogonal beliefs and bringing
| them up together is something of an ad hominem on a
| strawman.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The hilarious thing is that hormesis, taken seriously, would
| make one think the risk curve has a negative second derivative,
| as this study suggests it does. So a hormesis fan should have
| been suggesting LNT was underestimating the danger of low dose
| radiation.
| snarkconjecture wrote:
| All of the graphs in the literature suggest a positive second
| derivative. Why do you say negative? AIUI the model is that
| hormesis kicks in even for extremely small amounts of
| radiation, but has a limited effect and is overwhelmed by the
| negative effects of larger amounts.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I say negative because that's what this study is suggesting
| -- the slope of the curve is higher at lower dose than at
| higher doses.
| queuebert wrote:
| That doesn't mean negative. The curve could be flat, then
| steeply rises to match LNT at some point.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It means that somewhere the second derivative must be
| negative (proof: take the derivative, then apply the mean
| value theorem of calculus)
| scythe wrote:
| No it wouldn't. The hormesis hypothesis proposes that the
| body's repair mechanism from a low dose of radiation yields
| benefits that outweigh the damage of the radiation.
| Eventually those internal repair mechanisms are overwhelmed,
| leading to a positive second derivative.
|
| There is no specific evidence for hormesis (i.e. evidence
| lacking good alternative explanations) nor are there
| reasonable proposed mechanisms by which this would happen.
| But we should be clear about what it says.
| pfdietz wrote:
| No, what the hormesis idea suggests is that radiation
| induces an increase in repair mechanisms. So, add
| radiation, you boost defense mechanisms, and more radiation
| then has less effect. The curve is bent downward, the
| second derivative is negative.
| User23 wrote:
| Radiation hormesis isn't a fringe theory though[1]. Now it may
| not be correct I can't speak to that. I do know though that
| many reputable scientists consider it a possibility. The body
| produces useful adaptations to pretty much every other stressor
| in sufficiently low doses so why would radiation be different,
| especially given that life evolved in the presence thereof.
|
| Edit: I wouldn't be shocked though if the typical background
| dose is close to the maximum hormetic exposure and all but the
| smallest additional dosage starts the slide down the curve.
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33420860/
| altrigjtroll wrote:
| Its pretty well known that increases in CO2 aka global warming
| do cause plants to grow better. The world is getting greener.
|
| The more C02 the more plants grow.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| [dead]
| scythe wrote:
| I drew a line on Figure 1.
|
| https://i.postimg.cc/3r6vgz5s/cancer-lntm.jpg
|
| I was careful to ensure it was horizontal (y = 308 px, thanks
| GIMP). It is apparent that cancer rates at 60, 120, 180 mGy were
| higher than at 240 mGy. This may raise some questions about how
| to interpret the data.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Do you know what a confidence interval is?
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| I think that's the point, the paper is saying "a linear model
| was a good fit" when P=0.11. It's not at all a strong fit,
| compared to e.g. physics where p=1e-5 is desired. You'd think
| with 300k data points the results would at least be
| "statistically significant", p<0.05. The only data they
| present is averages over countries so I wouldn't be surprised
| if there was a huge effect of which site the worker was at,
| and their analysis deliberately ignores this effect by
| averaging, instead of including it as an explicit variable
| that explains most of the variation.
| scythe wrote:
| I work in this field. I know lots of statistics. Do you?
| psychphysic wrote:
| X DOUBT.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| How do we reconcile this with the study which found that low dose
| radiation surrounding atomic bomb detonation was protective?
|
| Low-dose radiation from A-bombs elongated lifespan and reduced
| cancer mortality relative to un-irradiated individuals
| https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
| cududa wrote:
| This is one study. There have been endless studies showing the
| negative effects of people near the Trinity test site. In fact,
| the government still pays out money to victims. This is a
| nonsense study that was never reproduced. Moreover, Japan
| provided extraordinary health care to victims that survived the
| bombings.
|
| I'm as pro-nuclear energy as you can get, but trying to hand
| wave away the dangers of radiation exposure is actively
| detrimental to the cause.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/civil/common/reca
| api wrote:
| Different forms of radiation maybe?
| psychphysic wrote:
| It's in the article
| kortex wrote:
| I'm guessing it might have something to do with the "impulse
| curve" of the radiation. Atom bomb would look like a spike with
| exponential decay. This study looks at constant low-grade
| exposure. It might be that a single main radiation event (if it
| doesn't acutely kill or sicken you too bad) causes an
| inflammatory response and increased mutation detection, while
| constant low-grade provides many more opportunities for errors
| to slip through the cracks.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Note: the title is misleading and contrary to the authors'
| conclusion. Where are the moderators?
|
| "The association between cumulative dose, lagged 10 years, and
| solid cancer mortality was reasonably well described by a linear
| model (fig 1); inclusion of a parameter describing the linear
| association between cumulative dose and solid cancer contributed
| substantially to model goodness of fit (supplementary table B).
| The addition of a parameter for the square of cumulative dose led
| to only a modest improvement in model goodness of fit compared
| with the linear model (likelihood ratio test =2.51, df=1;
| P=0.11), suggesting some downward curvature (that is, a negative
| estimated coefficient for the quadratic term). The addition of a
| parameter for an exponential term in the model led to a modest
| improvement in model goodness of fit for a linear-exponential
| model compared with the linear model (likelihood ratio test
| =3.17, df=1; P=0.08), again suggesting some downward curvature.
| To assess the trend over the lower cumulative dose range, we
| estimated associations between cumulative dose and solid cancer
| mortality over restricted ranges of 0-400 mGy cumulative dose
| (excess relative rate 0.63 (0.34 to 0.92) per Gy), 0-200 mGy
| cumulative dose (0.97 (0.55 to 1.39) per Gy), 0-100 mGy
| cumulative dose (1.12 (0.45 to 1.80) per Gy), 0-50 mGy cumulative
| dose (1.38 (0.20 to 2.60) per Gy), and 0-20 mGy cumulative dose
| (1.30 (-1.33 to 4.06) per Gy) (supplementary table C). Over the
| restricted range of 0-200 mGy cumulative dose, the association
| between cumulative dose and solid cancer mortality was well
| described by a linear model, and the addition of a parameter for
| the square of cumulative dose led to minimal improvement in model
| goodness of fit compared with the linear model (likelihood ratio
| test=0.54, df=1; P=0.46)."
|
| They say over and over that linear model (with relative risk = 1
| at 0 dose) is a good fit! this is LNT. They say the improvements
| of adding the other fit are marginal. The error bounds here are
| large, and the deviation is small but apparently systematic or
| real below 200mGy. The authors, as far as I can tell, are just
| reporting the figures without claiming LNT is wrong.
| gwillen wrote:
| I'm not a statistician, but I think there's a bit in your
| excerpt that is actually a concerning display of poor
| statistical literacy.
|
| If you're fitting a function which grows asymptotically (i.e.
| is monotonically increasing at least past a certain point), the
| best (polynomial) fit absolutely cannot have a negative
| quadratic as the leading term. If your model gives one, it is
| 100% guaranteed to be an artifact. Treating it as "suggesting
| some downward curvature" is a pretty bad misunderstanding.
|
| If you have doubts about this, consider what would happen if we
| added datapoints at higher doses. Every single datapoint we add
| to the right side of the graph will make the fit of a negative
| quadratic significantly worse. Ultimately, if you continue the
| graph indefinitely to the right, the fit of a negative
| quadratic is guaranteed to be infinitely bad. Any hint to the
| contrary is inherently an artifact of the limited dataset.
|
| (It may well be the case that, under certain conditions with a
| range-restricted dataset like this, such a finding might indeed
| be more likely if the true function has some downward
| curvature. But that's not statistics, it's voodoo. All the
| associated statistical parameters, p-value, likelihood ratio,
| etc., are absolutely meaningless nonsense.)
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Um, I don't think the HN title is contrary... Quoting:
|
| > What this study adds
|
| > The results of an updated study of nuclear workers in France,
| the UK, and the US suggest a linear increase in the relative
| rate of cancer with increasing exposure to radiation
|
| > Some evidence suggested a steeper slope for the dose-response
| association at lower doses than over the full dose range
|
| > The risk per unit of radiation dose for solid cancer was
| larger in analyses restricted to the low dose range (0-100 mGy)
| and to workers hired in the more recent years of operations
| omgJustTest wrote:
| The HN title is "Low dose radiation cancer 2x worse than
| predicted" than LNT for some unspecified region of the
| curve... they do not claim LNT is wrong, they do not even
| present their more sophistocated fits and they do not quote
| the 2x figure. It is misleading. The paper presents an LNT
| fit
|
| If you want to say "there is a bias above linear-no-threshold
| in the region less than 200mGy" you are correct, but also say
| that the bias has large error bars associated with it and
| that the data may or may not fit that trend.
|
| Unless you have p-values to back up the 2x claim, it
| shouldn't be in the title.
| Solvency wrote:
| I love how technologists/programmmers/enthusiasts will vehemently
| argue that EMFs, iPhones, Airpods, and all of the other countless
| devices constantly bombarding us with "non-ionizing radiation" is
| "completely and utterly harmless". Meanwhile even the most
| ancient patriarchal doctors with obsolete worldviews will suggest
| aspiring fathers may want to avoid having their phones in their
| pockets 24/7.
|
| No one knows jack shit, as we're finally discovering with PFAS,
| forever chemicals, etc.
|
| Stick with the earth.
| bena wrote:
| This is about ionising radiation though.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > will suggest aspiring fathers may want to avoid having their
| phones in their pockets
|
| That's because of the heat. We know for sure that higher
| temperatures temporarily lower sperm production. Those "ancient
| patriarchal doctors with obsolete worldviews" actually know a
| few things.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| That last comment was unnecessary and does not progress the
| conversation at all. You should delete it.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I've edited the comment, but it's pretty galling to see
| that kind of conspiratorial nonsense that I was reply to
| here.
| zosima wrote:
| If you look at the relative risk curve (the very last page of the
| supplementary data), most of the exposure levels contain 1 in the
| relative risk estimate (also please notice that for some reason
| the confidence interval is 90%, if choosing the customary 95% all
| relative risk confidence intervals would probably overlap
| relative risk of 1.0):
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/suppl/2023/08/16/bmj-2022-07...
|
| The fact that ~10mGy seems to not have 1.0 in the confidence
| interval is kind of bothering to me. Normal annual background
| radiation should be about ~3.5mGy (so 10mGy is about 3 years
| normal background radiation) and getting an increased solid tumor
| mortality risk from normal radiation levels, does suggest that
| something else has not quite been controlled for.
|
| Also the same group did the same paper on the same cohort before:
| https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h5359?ijkey=9f35e31bf918...
|
| This just seems to be updated with a slightly older population.
| gwillen wrote:
| Thanks for linking the graph, that's kind of wild. I agree with
| you that the lowest datapoint seems crazy. I can think of a few
| explanations.
|
| - Random bad luck.
|
| - As you say, failing to control for something -- although, if
| you then treat the lowest datapoint as being effectively the
| default risk, this would suggest support for radiation hormesis
| (that people who got a bit more than background radiation
| actually did better.)
|
| - Some kind of data collection artifact. Perhaps the people
| with the absolute lowest dose, in a radiation-worker dataset,
| are selected for being ones who are not getting an accurate
| measurement (i.e. sloppy about wearing dose badges or
| something), and those people genuinely do have worse outcomes.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I've been fascinated by the fact that electricians have a 2x
| greater risk of brain cancer than the general public. There are
| probably tons of environmental effects we're discounting / not
| modelling.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Do they? Do you have a link to a study? I quick google suggests
| there is no solid correlation.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Here's what I see:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=electricians+have+a+2x+great.
| ..
|
| And first result is a pubmed survey
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3474455/
|
| Anyway the majority of results, aside from a washington post
| article, confirm it.
| api wrote:
| Lots of chemical exposure in that profession too.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| I would suspect something like "the adhesive in electrical tape
| is carcinogenic" over "magnetic field cause cancer".
|
| But who knows. If they do we are deeply, truly fucked.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Electrification happened 100 years ago in the US.
| regularfry wrote:
| One story we were told in high school physics was that at one
| point there was a worry about power lines being linked with
| leukaemia cases. And yes, there was a statistical
| correlation.
|
| Turned out to be the weedkiller they were using to keep down
| the plants at the base of the pylons.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I mean until recently electrical tape did in fact use lead
| stabilizers. Pretty sure a lot still does.
| civilitty wrote:
| Lots of professions have significantly greater brain cancer
| risk than the general public like roofers, sheet metal workers,
| most people that deal with plastic manufacturing or cleaning
| solvents, and... waitresses [1].
|
| [1] https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/certain-
| occupations-p...
| nielsbot wrote:
| Interesting... My mother was a flight attendant for 35 years and
| she developed breast cancer later in life. She was told it was
| probably environmental not genetic based on testing.
|
| You do get additional radiation exposure while flying. Wonder if
| we should also study the effects of higher radiation exposure in
| the airline industry.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| A quick way to get in a lot of trouble in the US Nuclear Navy
| was to bring your TLD onboard a flight.
| mh- wrote:
| (ThermoLuminescent Dosimeter. Radiation badge thing that
| indicates with exposure.)
| boringalterego wrote:
| Same with the commercial nuclear industry. They don't like
| you taking them off site most of the time.
| makestuff wrote:
| Same thing with all imaging technicians in a hospital.
| Ex: X-ray, MRI, CT.
| ttymck wrote:
| Wow, there is a similar comment above[0] suggesting radiation
| badges for flight crew. I was going to ask if typical badges
| are sensitive enough to register the expected dose from
| flight.
|
| If I understand correctly, you're saying a single commercial
| flight is enough to trip the dosimeter?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37178559
| Gh0stRAT wrote:
| Not necessarily, but if it gets xrayed going through
| security then when they heat it up so that it luminesces,
| it'll be so bright that it messes up their carefully
| calibrated detector. This is expensive to fix and the
| dosimetry people get really mad at you.
|
| Source: wore one of these daily for years and would get
| regular reminders not to bring them on flights or anywhere
| else they would have to go through an xray machine (eg some
| federal buildings)
| nekoashide wrote:
| NYC-Tokyo over the polar route for a flight crew over an
| entire year gives you as much as a single full body CT.
|
| A single full body CT of radiation every year for that
| flight crew.
| maratc wrote:
| > My mother was a flight attendant for 35 years and she
| developed breast cancer later in life.
|
| From what I recall from the Chernobyl studies, the risk of
| being ill with cancer during the lifetime is 39% for females
| and 41% for males. The occupational hazards may get the
| individual risk up a little, but overall cancer is sadly a very
| frequent occurrence.
| klipt wrote:
| Keep in mind lifetime risk includes the risk of getting it in
| old age, where it might be a case of if you didn't die of
| cancer, you'd just die of some other ailment (heart attack,
| dementia, etc) instead.
|
| Evolution only optimized our parts to last for so long, and
| once you get past that age, everything kind of starts failing
| simultaneously.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| This is in part because too long life may in fact hurt the
| group. Of course we don't want to look at that because we
| are so hell bent on extending life, even talk about
| immortality.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Evolution works on the genetic level, not the population
| level. While some altruistic strategies might be selected
| for (e.g. kin selection), in general evolution doesn't
| care if something "hurts the group."
|
| In nature, dying of old age is incredibly rare as you are
| much more likely to die from predation or injury. Even if
| you suffered no ill effects from aging, ie you were
| biologically immortal, passing on your genes successfully
| would still require you to have offspring reasonably
| early in life. There is only selection pressure on your
| genes up to the point where you have successfully passed
| on your genes. It makes sense for evolution to keep you
| alive while raising your kids, and even while helping
| your offspring raise their kids (see the Grandmother
| Effect [0]), but eventually the marginal utility of your
| support drops so low, and the odds you're already dead
| rises so high, that there is simply no selective
| pressure. As an illustrative example, you could have a
| gene that makes you twice as strong as you were at 25,
| but if it only activates after you're 150, you and
| evolution would never know.
|
| On top of this, many genes have tradeoffs. If there is
| any mutation that gives benefits early in life but is
| harmful later in life, evolution will tend to select for
| it, especially versus the reverse. Similarly, traits that
| only provide a benefit for a finite period which is
| nevertheless long compared to natural lifespan can be
| favored over traits that work indefinitely (eg many
| mammals are born with a few sets of teeth and have no way
| of repairing them). This leads into more general
| accumulation-of-damage theories of aging.
|
| We see many species in nature, particularly those
| unlikely to undergo predation and at low risk of injury,
| with substantially longer or even indefinite lifespans.
| In the lab, we can also breed organisms like fruit flies
| to have substantially longer than natural lifespans.
|
| There is no evidence that living longer is harmful to
| others in hunter gatherer societies of the sort we
| evolved to live in, and certainly no evidence that such
| harm would still be present in modern, industrial
| societies.
|
| [0] https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/22/grandmother-
| effect-helps...
| chki wrote:
| You're talking about an optimization strategy that's a
| few hundred thousand years old though. (And might not
| even be an optimization strategy at all) Its
| applicability to modern life seems highly dubious
| considering the massive cultural changes we have been
| going through.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Damn that's almost a coin flip chance, what a fucking world
| man.
| maratc wrote:
| Note: that is about chances of _getting_ cancer, not _dying
| from_ cancer. Many people beat cancer. Many cancer types
| have good survival rates. Thyroid cancer (Chernobyl had
| much of these) sucks, but many people who got it had their
| thyroid removed and had to rely on drugs for the rest of
| their life ... this is obviously not ideal but much better
| than dying I guess?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The real question is when you get it. Having a slow growing
| cancer when you're 86 is pretty typical and often not even
| treated.
|
| Having breast cancer in your mid-30s, like a couple of my
| late dear friends did right after they had their
| children... often a death sentence...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Heads says heart disease, tails says cancer.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| Edge gets both.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Edge gets to die of old age.
| psychphysic wrote:
| You've put it clearly and simply better than I managed in my
| reply. The data is just too noisy we will need extraordinary
| large datasets to even beging to make comments.
| mint2 wrote:
| You do get higher radiation flying - but you are also
| surrounded by off gasing synthetic materials and receive
| frequent exposure to engine exhaust and get disrupted sleep due
| to hours and changing locations.
|
| So in other words, there's a lot of potential causes.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Breast cancer is too common in women to be able to deduce this
| kind of stuff without a huge amount of data (if ever).
|
| There are a few generic factors that are clearly causatively
| linked, but that doesn't mean we could work out less strong, or
| rarer links.
|
| Whole genome sequencing is becoming more common as is
| immunological and genetic studies on cancer cells.
|
| We might know one day but probably not any time soon.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Yeah, to bad we don't record employment records. Oh well.
| Supermancho wrote:
| The various US airlines, who partner with health insurance,
| certainly have access to this data. Cancer frequency, time
| in-flight, time in stratosphere, etc. Frequency of these
| things (or a subset) likely affects the rates.
| lazide wrote:
| Is it because of elevated cosmic ray exposure due to the
| high altitude? Or plastic in the inflight meals? Or the
| crazy schedules? Or is there even a statistically
| significant effect over time?
|
| Knowing any of these things is actually quite hard, and
| would require a lot of detailed data just to identify a
| potential pattern.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| To add to the data confusion lol, my grandmother
| basically never left her home farm. Never drank. Ate meat
| they slaughtered themselves. Sweets were a rare treat on
| holidays. You could barely get her to take a car trip
| because it scared her. Other than her no one is aware to
| have ever had cancer in our families history.
|
| Died of breast cancer.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://srag.jsc.nasa.gov/spaceradiation/What/What.cfm
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cosmicionizingradia...
|
| Sounds like there is enough to evidence to perform a
| longitudinal cancer study across air transport workers to
| better understand the potentially increased cancer risk.
|
| EDIT: Is hazard pay warranted? Also, perhaps airlines should
| have to provide estimated cumulative exposure to employees
| based on their flight trip logs. Estimation should be
| straightforward based on flight track logs combined with cosmic
| radiation satellite data.
| klipt wrote:
| Can't they just make all employees wear lead vests?
|
| I guess the added weight would cost a lot in fuel...
| fluidcruft wrote:
| If anything they'd do the opposite so that the public
| doesn't get "the wrong idea" something dangerous is up.
| Just look at how Homeland Security made it illegal to
| measure how much radiation the post-9/11 security screening
| devices put out, forbade medical physicists from testing
| them, forbade employees working near the scanners from
| obtaining and wearing their own protection, and fired
| workers who wore their own dosimetry tags.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Homeland Security made it illegal //
|
| How do they stop sales of scanning equipment to people
| who want to do testing? You could easily buy them abroad,
| and do tests abroad.
|
| Also, could you cite the US Code on this please. Thanks.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Why is it our job to establish the safety of devices? The
| TSA lied through its teeth about these devices and is
| accountable only to themselves.
|
| https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/scientists-
| cant-ch...
|
| https://www.financialsense.com/contributors/gonzalo-
| lira/a-f...
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| You could also just leave a dosimeter in your pocket when
| going through the airport next. There's a few on the
| market that log over Bluetooth.
|
| Not taken one through the body scanner, I've not actually
| had to go through a body scanner in quite a while at the
| airport. Just usual metal detector.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I was referring to the security officers who stand next
| to the machines everyday. They were forbidden from
| measuring anything related to occupational exposure. At
| one point the TSA found itself caught in so many lies
| about their supposed "testing" that they ran a very
| public PR-style limited study. Coincidentally, nowadays
| the backscatter scanners have been quietly replaced with
| millimeter wave scanners.
|
| Anyway the point of my comment wasn't to re-litigate
| this. It's more that the original comment struck me as
| "can't the fox just guard the henhouse?"
| moffkalast wrote:
| Probably makes sense to add HDPE+boron radiation shielding
| to the entire cabin. Or the simpler one, just don't fly as
| high.
| samus wrote:
| Unlike in medical facilities, the radiation comes from
| multiple directions. Also, the crew moves around the plane.
| The vests would have to cover an impractically large area.
|
| Also, when radiation is blocked by matter, secondary
| radiation is generated. Since the composition of cosmic
| radiation is for sure different than the one found in other
| occupational settings, lead vests might or might not have
| the same effect. Also, the aluminium skin of the aircraft
| already has a similar effect. There might not be that much
| to be done practically.
|
| It would be interesting though to let flight crew wear
| radiation badges.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure military flight crews already do that,
| albeit with the idea of measuring exposure in case of
| nuclear war.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| > Estimation should be straightforward based on flight track
| logs combined with cosmic radiation satellite data.
|
| Just take a cheap dosimeter on your next flight. I have an
| Atomfast that I often make recordings of exposure with for
| amusement, as well as using it when looking at neat rocks
| outside (some areas I like to hike in have surprisingly high
| radiation levels due to there being some of uranium in the
| rocks).
| tenpies wrote:
| Since we're on this topic, there also seems to be enough
| evidence to suggest you should wear sun screen when flying.
|
| > Pilots and cabin crew have approximately twice the
| incidence of melanoma compared with the general population.
| Further research on mechanisms and optimal occupational
| protection is needed.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482339
|
| As someone who enjoys looking out the window, I treat it much
| like going to the beach and re-apply sun screen in longer
| flights.
| e93849 wrote:
| Glass will block most UV light, so maybe the melanoma is
| from the cosmic rays? Not sure if sunscreen helps with
| that.
| gnulinux wrote:
| Sunscreen doesn't block cosmic rays, those are high energy
| atomic nucleus (that are normally filtered out by the
| atmosphere), not high energy photons/light (that end up on
| beaches). Did you previously find scholarly studies that
| suggest wearing sunscreen helps with melanoma, or did you
| just see high melanoma incidence rate in frequent flyers,
| and assumed sunscreen will help?
| bhk wrote:
| Sunscreen blocks UV, not cosmic rays, which is the
| radiation for which jetliner passengers receive an
| unusually high dose. The glass in the windows probably
| blocks 75% of UV, and UV exposure is associated with other
| types of skin cancer, not melanoma (except in cases where
| one has a history of bad sunburns). In fact, in this
| review, melanoma is said to be inversely correlated with
| occupational exposure to UV:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9335442/
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's been done:
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cancer.html
| yongjik wrote:
| LNT is a funny model: it's extremely simple yet people
| misunderstand it all the time. Like, it's basically how you would
| model loss of money would affect your finance. You lose ten
| cents, you're out of ten cents. You lose ten million dollars,
| you're out of ten million dollars. Totally proportional.
|
| Now the funny thing is, nobody sane would say "Losing a quarter
| that fell out of your pocket is losing money, gambling away a
| million dollars is also losing money! There's no threshold beyond
| which losing money becomes not losing money, therefore having a
| loose pocket is as bad as gambling addiction!"
|
| Yet change the subject from dollars to radiation, and so many
| people run around saying "No threshold! That means there's no
| safe dose! Living next to a working nuclear reactor is as bad as
| walking into the ruins of Chernobyl!"
| pfdietz wrote:
| The large INWORKS cohort study of nuclear workers finds that in
| the low dose range (0-100 mGy, or 0-10 rad) the solid cancer
| mortality risk per unit exposure is twice that predicted by the
| LNT model. Radiation appears to become more dangerous at low
| doses over prolonged periods, the opposite of the assertion of
| some nuclear energy advocates.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That would be a very good argument against the further
| deployment of coal.
| csours wrote:
| To be clear, since some people don't know:
| https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
| pfdietz wrote:
| As I have pointed out, the radioactivity in uranium ore is
| higher than the radioactivity in coal, when comparing the
| amount of ore and the amount of coal that needs to be mined
| to produce a given amount of energy in today's power
| plants.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Nuclear plants don't tend to burn the fuel into tiny
| particulates and send them into the atmosphere.
| [deleted]
| maratc wrote:
| These special studies are good for a scientific consumption, but
| they don't do much to make the results comprehensible to the
| general public.
|
| In this specific case, what's missing is the bigger perspective,
| like this:
|
| "If we look at the 100,000 _average dead people_ , we'll find
| that 30,000 of them died from cancer. Now, we are looking at
| 100,000 dead _low dose nuclear workers_ , and we have previously
| thought that 30,010 of these would have died from cancer, but now
| we've found that number to be closer to 30,020."
|
| This really puts "2x worse" into a proper context, which is:
| there are low-risk occupational hazards in nuclear industry.
| csours wrote:
| Other numbers are more meaningful than "died of cancer"
|
| - Total time with cancer - including time without symptoms
|
| - Total time affected by cancer as a disease - time with
| symptoms
|
| - Total lifespan lost - how young did a person die of the
| disease
|
| There's probably no way to really know #1, #2 is hard to gather
| information on, #3 is more do-able.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Some US Airports had backscatter x-ray scanners used by the TSA
| with their shiny badges who certainly had no training on x-ray
| safety.
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2220673/TSA-quietly...
|
| I now have cancer and am working with law firms on legal options.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > ProPublic reports that researchers have estimated that
| widespread use of backscatter x-rays will cause between 6 and
| 100 cases of cancer each year among fliers.
|
| > The TSA maintains the devices are within federal safety
| limits.
|
| I've always "opted out" of backscatter machines. In about half
| the cases airport staff were exasperated with me. In Australia
| they interrogated me for "the specific reason" I requested a
| manual pat-down instead. I made one up.
|
| But my real reason was that I fly a lot and I don't need to be
| blasted with millimeter wave x-rays for no good reason.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| I've only ever seen mmWave full body scanners, TSA began
| phasing out backscatter X-rays in 2012 [1] and according to
| this [2] backscatter X-ray is no longer used in US airports.
| Maybe different in other countries, I don't know.
|
| mmWave is radio frequency not X-ray and similar frequencies
| are used in 5G.
|
| [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/tsa-removes-x-ray-
| body-sc...
|
| [2] https://www.lancsindustries.com/blog/what-you-need-to-
| know-a...
| fortran77 wrote:
| "Millimeter Wave" machines are NOT "backscatter x-ray"
| machines. Millimeter Wave is a radio-wave device.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Makes you wonder how safe the hospital staff is using XR
| fluoroscopy day in day out? (Cath Labs, GI teams, etc.)
| athenot wrote:
| They wear 30lb lead aprons. On a practical note, it's back
| strain from having that thing on 10-12h a day.
| sarchertech wrote:
| They're supposed to, but they frequently don't according to
| my wife (ER doctor).
| wnevets wrote:
| If you look at the history of what is considered a safe dosage of
| radiation you'll notice the amount only ever goes down, never up.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Low-dose radiation from A-bombs elongated lifespan and reduced
| cancer mortality relative to un-irradiated individuals
|
| https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
| wnevets wrote:
| Did this increase the safe dosage amount of radiation?
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| This shows that the idea that there is no safe level of
| radiation on principle is wrong.
| wnevets wrote:
| I don't know if you're being serious or not.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| wnevets wrote:
| Which of the two plausible interpretations is the
| strongest? Please enlighten me esteemed HN guideline
| expert. I am asking because I don't know the answer.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If that was in any way accepted then we'd have radiation
| inoculation treatments mandatory for everyone at a young age.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Alternatively, decisions were made prior to knowing
| everything there is to know about radiation.
|
| Alternatively, there are trade-offs that would make
| mandatory radiation not a good idea. For example, infection
| risk, or auto-immune disease risk.
| cududa wrote:
| You have no idea what you're talking about, and the fact
| that you're so confident over your obscenely wrong
| conclusions makes you a dangerous person. How about going
| and exposing yourself to a massive dose of radiation if
| you're so sure you're right
| hgomersall wrote:
| I'm not seeing conclusions, let alone confident
| conclusions. An interesting paper was linked to that
| apparently showed some survival benefit from A-bomb
| survivors. By all means, challenge the paper, but it's
| certainly interesting. It might not be radiation exposure
| that led to the increased survival rates but it could
| plausible be.
| wnevets wrote:
| > I'm not seeing conclusions, let alone confident
| conclusions.
|
| You may want to check the other comments created that by
| person, for example this one.
|
| > This shows that the idea that there is no safe level of
| radiation on principle is wrong.
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