I do get focused on a few things - labels are one of them (nutrient/menu labels) and radiation is probably the other -
Because I have blogged about the risk of radiation, especially from medical testing, including chemical and imaging devices, I felt it important to take a minute from my studies to report the results of someone else's.
The referent study is published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal but the full article is not yet available in my University database. The gist: researchers used medical records to track the type of test and dose of radiation (perhaps estimate) that a group of persons who had had a heart attack received in the ten years following their event.
These persons, over 82,000 of them, did not have cancer before their heart attack. Approximately 12,000 of them did develop cancer afterwords. The scientists were able to show that the addition of doses, doses that accumulate over time, were positively associated with cancer cases. They found a certain percent increase with every 10miliservet (mSv).
As I said, I have not been able to review the full research report for things like sample size, statistical tests, and all that science stuff. What the abstract and news articles don't tell us is important. I would like to know how many persons who are similar to those 80+ thousand but did not receive radiation and also got cancer. Is it significantly less?
Dose response is one of the criteria for causation (exposure to outcome).
I have every reason to believe that radiation from our medical testing is putting us at increased risk of cancer. I have been very honest about that - still this is just one study, one headline even... so don't think it fact, but do think it important.
Blogs of note, re mSv - from me can be found here.
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