From Eve Roman, Pat Doyle, Noreen Maconochie, Graham Davies, Peter Smith and Valerie Beral, School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
We were very concerned to read the article on nuclear plants and leukaemia
(This Week, 29 May, p 22).
The article was based on our paper in the British Medical Journal(vol 318, p 1443),
and we believe the results were not summarised appropriately.
Overall, we found no excess of cancer, and in particular of leukaemia, in the
children of nuclear workers compared with the general population. This important
finding was downplayed by your correspondent and the title of the article
(“Lethal legacy: The nuclear-dad-is-bad theory may have been right after all”)
bore no resemblance to the conclusions reached by the authors.
Our study was set up to investigate possible links between child health and
parents’ occupational exposure to ionising radiation. It was restricted to
employees at nuclear plants who had been the subjects of a report alleging an
increased incidence of leukaemia in young people living nearby. It was not, as
your article stated, set up as “an attempt to confirm or reject the work of the
late Martin Gardner”.
The quote “the children of men exposed to radiation while working at nuclear
plants are twice as likely to develop leukaemia” is taken out of context. The
risk estimate was not statistically significant and thus might have arisen by
chance.
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Further, it is misleading to present the higher risk of leukaemia among the
children of men who had accumulated a radiation dose of more than 100
millisieverts prior to conception as support for the Gardner hypothesis when two
of the three cases on which it was based were included in Gardner’s original
study. We were careful to point out the overlap of the two studies and to
emphasise caution in the interpretation of this finding.
London
