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| Test of the Linear-No Threshold Theory of Radiation
Induced Cancer By Bernard L. |
Abstract Acceptance of the linear-no threshold theory (LNT) of radiation induced cancer is costing Society many billions of dollars per year, it is therefore extremely important to test LNT in the low dose region where it has never been experimentally tested. Data on lung cancer mortality rate,m, vs mean radon exposure, r, in 1729 U.S. Counties (comprising 90% of the U.S. Population) were used to test LNT. While this is an ecological study rather than a study of individuals as ordinarily preferred by epidemiologists, it differs from essentially all other ecological studies in that "the ecological fallacy" does not apply. In fact we start with the risk to an individual from his individual radon exposure, and derive, by rigorous mathematics, the predictions from LNT that, with the BEIR-IV prescribed correction for smoking prevalence, S, m should increase with increasing r by 7.3% per pCi/L; whereas the data show a decrease of about 8 (+/-0.8)% per pCi/L, a discrepancy of 20 S.D. Extensive efforts to explain this discrepancy by uncertainties in the data for m, r, and S, by effects of confounding by about 450 different socioeconomic variables, by geographical location, and by altitude and weather, by variations in cancer rates with time, by discarding outlying data points, by the weaknesses in ecological studies that have been pointed out in the literature, etc have been uniformly unsuccessful in even appreciably reducing the discrepancy. Effects of known r-S correlations -- rural people have lower S and higher r than urban people, and smokers have lower r than non-smokers -- were calculated in detail and found to be trivial. Requirements on some unrecognized confounding factor that can explain our discrepancy are such that its existence is highly implausible. It was shown that our data do not conflict with any other known data. It was concluded that by far the most plausible explanation of our discrepancy is gross failure of LNT in this low dose region where it has never been experimentally tested.
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