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.

   "Correlation is not causation"  ?

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?

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).

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.

> 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...

Some methodology issues with the first paper are described on PubPeer:

https://pubpeer.com/publications/AEA87585FB0365719098E2C0D06...

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.

Joe Jackson sang it decades ago: "Everything...gives you cancer..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbgXOkyF09M

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'.

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...)

If you think about it it's quite insane what we did as a species and we survived.

Alchemists conjured thousands of weird new substances, and we just shoved them everywhere they seemed fit. Asbestos everywhere, lead in gasoline, expanded polypropylene wrapping food and holding warm coffee, plasticisers practically everywhere..

And we only really learned about the ones that stood out as the worst. The effect of others, slower acting will keep being uncovered for decades to come.

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.

"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.

This is so delicious. I’m glad that someone took the time to point out the absurdity of this class of study [1]…though nobody will ever listen.

The kind of crap “research” being criticized here makes me almost irrationally angry, because these people are at Harvard, and getting tons of international press for this slop - which they can crank out, precisely because they skip the hard parts that slow real researchers down. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of good researchers languish in anonymity, because it’s incredibly rare to find a high profile result using good methodology, and worse, it takes time.

In a just world, the people who get caught doing this stuff would be drummed out of academia.

[1] uncontrolled observational research

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.

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

I love seeing quacks get shredded by articles like this.

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

seems higher income and gluttony? is what causes cancer?

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.

> 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.

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

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

I thought the papers author's nearly ten year employment at `Petrofac` is interesting and probably warrents a mention.

> Petrofac designs, builds, manages and maintains oil, gas, refining, petrochemicals and renewable energy infrastructure.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/profile/yazan-alwadi/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yazan-alwadi-ab1b112b/

> 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.

Social Economic Status is certainly associated with all sorts of things, but being near a freeway means being near brake dust (which used to have asbestos), being near all sorts of tailpipe nasties, being near tire dust, etc. I'd be surprised if it was all explained by money.

Besides the bias question (which is possible and apparently likely for both sides), I realize this is a touchy subject for many but the tone of this article is rather more irritated than it really needs to be. They even mention that the authors of the Harvard paper said the study wasn't meant to show causality, but the very next section heading is "Ridiculous things you can 'prove' caused cancer mortality," which suggests that is what the authors of the original paper were trying to do. If you're going to accuse them of being deceptive, at least be open about it instead of using this sort of passive-aggressive approach.

Also, they say:

"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."

I'm no expert in experiment design, but unless I missed something, I have qualms about calling this method a true "replication."

Do Tilson and Stein have more or less of a vested interest than the people who wrote the studies they are criticizing? It’s not obvious to me that they are more (or less) conflicted.

My understanding was that they take issue with the word "attributable". They don't attempt to propose a mechanism by which living near Costco causes cancer (the most strongly associated of the landmarks they measured). Rather, the implication is that it doesn't. Like I think it's a lot of words arguing that "correlation doesn't prove causation" could be restated "association doesn't prove attribution."

> but there are still mechanisms

No, there aren't.

> where something could go out the cooling stacks and deliver something harmful downwind.

This is beyond ridiculous. EVERYTHING in nuclear power plants, that can feasibly be a vector for a radiation leak, is heavily monitored. And radiation leaks into the coolant loops is the most obvious thing.

> we know now that non-ionizing radiation causes cellular heating

At levels that are not achievable outside a microwave.