Describe the radon epidemiological studies?
To have a reasonable certainty in the conclusionss, many thousands of cases are required to detect the increased risk of lung cancer due to radon. This is becausee the more things that cause a disease the harder it is to separate one cause from another
, thus it takes many cases to pinpoint the risk from each separate cause. The U. S. Public Health
Service radon experts estimatee that 10,000 to 30,000 cases, and twice as many controls would be needed to conduct a definitive epidemiologic study of residential radon lung cancer risk. The residential studiess conductedd to date have all included between 50 and 1500 cases and thus have been too small to provide conclusive information.
Some years ago this same process was used to detect an increased risk of lung cancer due to cigarette smoking. It took many years of study to make the positive link between the cause and effect of smoking and lung cancer. Most of the increased lung cancer risk is attributable to smoking throughh mathematical modeling. The research process for smoking was very laborious. However, radon ' s processs is even more challenging because radon' s contribution to increased lung cancer risk( 12 %) is difficult to see against the large background of lung cancer due to other causes, which include smoking, asbestoss, some heavy metals and other types of radiation; i. e., detecting radon-relatebeach already full of sand. lung cancer is like trying to detect a 12 % increase of sand on a
Finally, it is difficult to accurately determine radon exposures in residential settings since we are estimating past exposuress from current measurements. The number of required study participants increases with the difficulty in determining the exposure.
Why are residential epidemiology studies of radon so complicated?
There are many factors that must be considered when designing a residential radon epidemiology study. It is very expensivee and often impossible to design a study that takes all the pertinent factors into consideration. These factors include
:
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Mobility: people move a lot over their lifetime; it is virtually impossible to go back and test every home wheree an individual has lived;