ets exposure, lung cancer - Legacy Tobacco Documents Library

• The study population characteristics also reveal that over 70%
of cases and controls were aged 60 or older . This calls into
question the accuracy of childhood exposure estimates provided
by these women, who were asked to recall parental smoking
habits of more than 50 years ago ._
• Furthermore, the socioeconomic and educational composition of
the study population argues against generalizing results
reported from this study to the United States population as a
whole . The majority of cases and controls were drawn from low
socioeconomic strata : more than 40%- had household incomes of
less than $20,000 . In terms of education, one-third of cases
had no more than a high school education .
• The conclusion stated in the abstract of the paper -
"Exposure to ETS during adult life increases risk of lung
cancer in lifetime nonsmokers" -- gives the appearance that
the reported results are applicable to both men and women,
when in fact, only women were studied .
• Fontham and colleagues neglect to discuss the available
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/wyk81f00/pdf
workplace data from other spousal smoking studies . Of
particular interest is the notee that several large recent
case-control studies (Janerich, et al . ; Bro4mson, et al . ;
Stockwell, et al . ; Wu-Williams, et al .) have reported results
for workplace exposure that were not statistically