Gibb et al. respond

Our plain-English summary of Gibb et al. respond, by H. Gibb, K. Fulcher, S. Nagarajan, et al (American Journal of Public Health, 2014).

The study

• Authors: H. Gibb, K. Fulcher, S. Nagarajan, S. McComish, N.A. Fallahian, H.J. Hoffman, C. Haver, S. Tolmachev
• Journal: American Journal of Public Health
• Published: 2014;104(2):e1-2
• Type of article: Letter, Comment
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher · Free full text

In plain English

This is a letter to the editor in which the authors replied to a letter by Joey Zhou criticizing their earlier analysis of mesothelioma deaths among workers in the US Transuranium and Uranium Registries, people occupationally exposed to radiation. It reports no new study. The authors said Zhou's letter misquoted them: they had called their proportionate mortality ratio (PMR) for mesothelioma the highest in their own study, not the highest ever, and an order of magnitude higher than any occupation reported by McElvenny et al. In reply to the claim that the analysis software overestimated the ratio because 6 of 7 mesothelioma deaths occurred before 1999, they said all deaths in their study were coded to ICD-10 and the software manual did not bar such use. They added that 11 more deaths had since been added to the Registries, and that there were now 10 individuals with mesothelioma among the 340 workers. The authors concluded that the proportion of deaths attributed to mesothelioma was significantly elevated. The letter does not mention asbestos.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: letter to the editor (authors' reply to a critical letter about their earlier article)
• Who was studied: workers in the US Transuranium and Uranium Registries; the authors state there are now 340 workers who were occupationally exposed to radiation
• Exposure: occupational radiation exposure (no asbestos or fiber exposure is discussed in this letter)
• Main results:
  • The authors said they did not claim their mesothelioma PMR was the highest ever observed, only the highest in their study
  • The authors said they compared their PMR only with occupations reported by McElvenny et al., not with all published studies
  • In reply to the criticism about pre-1999 coding, the authors said all deaths in their study were coded to ICD-10
  • The authors said the analysis software's manual does not prohibit its use when mesothelioma deaths occurred before 1999
  • Since the original analysis, 11 more deaths were added to the Registries; mesothelioma was reported as the underlying cause of one of them
  • Only 73 of the deaths in the Registries occurred after 1998
  • One additional individual was found to have mesothelioma at autopsy, after the cause of death had originally been reported as lung cancer
  • The authors counted 10 individuals with mesothelioma among the 340 radiation-exposed workers in the Registries
• The authors' conclusion: The authors concluded that, whether all deaths or only post-1998 deaths are used, the proportion of deaths attributed to mesothelioma is significantly elevated. No new calculation is presented in the letter to support this.

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Lung cancer, Mesothelioma.

Related studies

• Analyses of radiation and mesothelioma in the US Transuranium and Uranium Registries — H. Gibb, K. Fulcher, et al. (2013)
• A Monte Carlo t Test to Evaluate Mesothelioma and Radiation in the US Transuranium and Uranium Registries — J.Y. Zhou, S.L. McComish, et al. (2019)
• Impact of chemical exposure on cancer mortality in a French cohort of uranium processing workers — S. Zhivin, D. Laurier, et al. (2013)
• USTUR Special Session Roundtable-US Transuranium and Uranium Registries (USTUR): A Five-decade Follow-up of Plutonium and Uranium Workers — S.Y. Tolmachev, M.J. Swint, et al. (2019)
• Risk of cancer from occupational exposure to ionising radiation: retrospective cohort study of workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (INWORKS) — D.B. Richardson, E. Cardis, et al. (2015)
• French cohort of the uranium processing workers: mortality pattern after 30-year follow-up — I. Guseva Canu, E. Cardis, et al. (2010)

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