Things that apparently cause cancer

dekhn

Cancer risk associations studies are not normally described as "proving" anything. The article being criticized uses 'risk' and 'association'. There is a long history of argument around these sorts of studies, there was a previous series of these around people living near power plants (where it seems like SES, not plant proximity, was the strongest explanatory variable, see https://www.aps.org/archives/publications/apsnews/200710/ele... ). I've seen similar "living near a freeway causes cancer" arguments. There was a massive court case by flight attendants, who have a higher rate of cancer than the regular population. In reading the criticism, I noticed the authors keep using the term "prove" and they also keep trying to come up with mechanisms ("refueling of the plant"). Even the argument about plant worker exposure compared to people living far away doesn't completely work, because the plant workers are taking all sorts of precautions to minimize exposure to radiation, but there are still mechanisms where something could go out the cooling stacks and deliver something harmful downwind. The biophysics of cancer causation is entirely nontrivial and looking for the actual sources of the cancer risk is challenging, and watching physics people argue with epidemiologists gets old quickly (my field is biophysics, and I've had a few physics people insist that non-ionizing radiation couldn't possibly cause cancer, "because it doesn't damage DNA". Unfortunately, that argument isn't good, because it presupposes a mechanism (DNA damage due to radiation); we know now that non-ionizing radiation causes cellular heating, stress response, and more, which are all associated (based mostly on in vitro studies) with increased rate of cancer. Note the authors (and the institute they work for) have vested interest: Dr. Adam Stein is the Director of the Nuclear Energy Innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute, where his work centers on the technology, regulation, economics, and risk governance of advanced nuclear energy. Deric Tilson is a Senior Nuclear Energy Innovation Analyst at The Breakthrough Institute, where he focuses on advancing nuclear energy as a critical pathway to a carbon-free and energy-abundant future.

forgetfreeman

There was a time when encountering truly naked propaganda was something of a rarity. Clearly those days are behind us.

fliglr

I like this article: Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review ( https://www.cold-takes.com/does-x-cause-y-an-in-depth-eviden... )

solenoid0937

I love seeing quacks get shredded by articles like this.

hatthew

Did I miss it, or do the authors not bother to explain how the original methodology is wrong? Do we just take their word for it?

bjourne

"Over the last several months, we have replicated the results of these papers. The authors supplied us with eight lines of code and answered a couple of questions about the covariates, which did not replicate the results. Most of our replication was done through first principles combined with trial and error. Once we were reasonably close to the results of the first national study on cancer mortality, we took the methodology and applied it to numerous other landmarks." Author implies that Alwadi et al. was not forthcoming with sharing the data underlying their studies. Because otherwise they should be able to exactly replicate their results. "Reasonably close" does not cut it.

fliglr

I started noticing awhile ago that you seem to have this pipeline in scientific/academic reporting that goes academic paper -> press release -> science journalists -> regular journalists -> Facebook/Reddit. Even if the original authors never say anything about causation, inevitably the language of correlation (related to, is linked to, associated with, correlated with, coincides with, etc.) will turn into the language of causation (leads to, increases/decreases, has an effect on, causes, etc.) somewhere in this pipeline. Then suddenly everybody around you is talking about how going to bed with shoes on causes headaches, or goes playing tennis increases longevity. There is some atrocious science journalism out there

chrisvls

As someone with experience in this field (and plenty of skepticism of geographic association studies), I find the article lacking. Is there a technical write-up? It is quite odd that the authors say that they don’t know if the original method can yield negative results. Some of the results are expressed as relative risk, so there’s a numerator and denominator. That should be enough to begin to work it out, since all possible exclusive numerators sum to the denominator. It feels like if you don’t understand whether some areas will be lower than average, then perhaps you don’t understand the method sufficiently. It sounds like they reverse engineered the original method, but that means they could be applying an overfit model and getting spurious results that the original wouldn’t give. That’s all speculation, hence we need the technical write up.

Magi604

Every time I come across an article about cancer, I'm reminded of that website that catalogued all the things that The Daily Mail said either caused or prevented cancer. https://web.archive.org/web/20200221175201/http://kill-or-cu... Too bad it's down, but here's an archive of it.

herf

The main outcome of the original papers is RR (relative risk) and the main number discussed in this article is "people living near a landmark" which is obviously nonsensical. You'd need to compute your "Costco risk index" using epidemiological risk compared with a baseline, and there's not one place here where they claim to do it. As written, this does not appear to be a serious effort.

rgmerk

Yawn. Anybody that has looked into the data knows that nuclear is acceptably safe, particularly compared to fossil fuels. The problem with nuclear is cost, not safety, and thus far it appears intractable in the real world rather than the fantasy world that the likes of BTI inhabit, whereas the problems and limitations of renewable energy are actually being solved.

aljgz

I hoped to see a systematic explanation of what the correlations show. As long as we don't have a viable explanation, there is something interesting there to discover. It can be that the statistical analysis is fundamentally flawed. Pointing out a flaw that tricked several serious researchers is progress. If it was because of some other factor (let's assume there are many more elderly people living around those neighborhoods, can't think of a better example now).

briHass

I thought for sure this was going to talk about the non-scientific IARC classifications. Even group 1, the doozies, doesn't consider dose or actual risk, leading to ludicrous adjacency like processed meats and asbestos. Scientists that aren't politically motivated wouldn't classify things on a list with terms like 'probably' or 'possibly'.

dbcooper

Some methodology issues with the first paper are described on PubPeer: https://pubpeer.com/publications/AEA87585FB0365719098E2C0D06...

krautburglar

TLDR; Paid shills argue with other paid shills over each other’s creative accounting.

jchw

> The attributable number of deaths from this methodology is probably zero, but the attributable number of bad papers is at least four. Brutal. Nothing more to add, but sadly bunk or not these papers will surely be quoted by a lot of entities for a long time no matter how blatantly broken they are.

chr15m

A different theory worth investigating: hot dogs, universities, Costco, nuclear reactors, the urban environment, and modern living generally, do increase cancer risk.

verteu

> Over the last several months, we have replicated the results of these papers. The authors supplied us with eight lines of code and answered a couple of questions about the covariates, which did not replicate the results. Most of our replication was done through first principles combined with trial and error. Once we were reasonably close to the results of the first national study on cancer mortality, we took the methodology and applied it to numerous other landmarks. Any details of the methodology? Is it possible some mistakes were made during this "trial and error"? edit: Some aggregated data is available from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12929679/ , but far from enough to reproduce: https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/es...

mjanx123

The root cause of cancer is cellular stress. One cope mechanism with cellular stress is the cells fusing. On occasion a blood and a somatic cell will fuse. A blood cell is an organism on its own, disconnected from the electric network of the somatic cells which controls the growth and shaping into functional tissues and organs. When the programming of the fused cell combines in a way that it wants to grow and divide while disconnected from the body control network, you get a cancer. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EWNjw3pg9sA Pretty much anything can cause cellular stress, including the normal operation of worn cells in an old body. Cataloguing the strength of the stressors is still useful.

sfmike

seems higher income and gluttony? is what causes cancer?