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Heterogeneity of variation of relative risk by age at exposure in the Japanese atomic bomb survivors

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An Erratum to this article was published on 28 February 2012

Abstract

General reductions in cancer relative risk with increasing age at exposure are observed in the Japanese atomic bomb survivors and in other groups. However, there has been little evidence of heterogeneity in such trends by cancer type within the Japanese cohort, nor for cancer-type variations in other factors (sex, attained age) that modify relative risk. A recent report on the Japanese atomic bomb survivors published by Preston et al. in 2007 suggests that solid cancer relative risk exhibits a U-shaped relationship with age at exposure, and is initially decreasing and then increasing at older exposure ages. In this report, we reanalyse the latest Japanese atomic bomb survivor solid cancer mortality and incidence data analysed by Preston and co-workers, stratifying by cancer subtype where possible, the stratification being both in relation to the baseline and the radiation-associated excess. We find highly statistically significant (P < 0.001) variations of relative risk by cancer type, and statistically significant variations by cancer type in the adjustments for sex (P = 0.010) and age at exposure (P = 0.013) to the relative risk. There is no statistically significant (P > 0.2) variation by cancer type in the adjustment of relative risk for attained age. Although, for all incident solid cancers, there is marginally statistically significant (P = 0.033) variation of relative risk with a quadratic log-linear function of age at exposure, there is much weaker variation in the relative risk of solid cancer mortality (P > 0.1). However, the manner in which relative risk varies with age at exposure is qualitatively similar for incidence and mortality, so one should not make too much of these differences between the two datasets. Stratification by solid cancer type slightly weakens the evidence for quadratic variation in relative risk by age at exposure (P = 0.060).

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for the detailed comments of the two referees. This report makes use of data obtained from the RERF in Hiroshima, Japan. RERF is a private foundation funded equally by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare and the US Department of Energy through the US National Academy of Sciences. The conclusions in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the scientific judgement of RERF or its funding agencies. This work was funded partially by the European Commission under contract FP6-036465 (NOTE).

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Correspondence to Mark P. Little.

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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00411-012-0408-y

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Little, M.P. Heterogeneity of variation of relative risk by age at exposure in the Japanese atomic bomb survivors. Radiat Environ Biophys 48, 253–262 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00411-009-0228-x

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