Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both cigarette smoke and inhaled asbestos fibres can cause lung cancer, but the assessment of how these agents act in combination is a matter of great difficulty. In non-smokers, the condition is so rare that, in any cohort of asbestos workers, the standardised mortality ratio (SMR, that is the ratio of the numbers of deaths observed and expected) is quite imprecise. The SMR for smokers, with which it has to be compared, is also subject to sampling error, making the interaction even more unstable. This accounts for much of the variation that has bedevilled evaluation. The debate has been concentrated on two hypotheses: additive (asbestos and cigarette smoke act independently) and multiplicative (asbestos produces an effect proportional to the effect of smoking). The very few data available until 1977 failed to fit the former and fitted the latter only poorly. They would have fitted better a hypothesis of greater synergism, but the only one proposed was too convoluted. So the multiplicative model appeared the only alternative, and was deemed 'accepted'. The ratio of lung cancer SMRs for non-smokers and smokers was generalised into the relative asbestos effect, RAE, with all the advantages of a parametric statistic (Berry et al., 1985, British Journal of Industrial Medicine 42, 12). On the multiplicative hypothesis, RAE=1, while RAE>1 indicates less synergism. The RAEs for the three most recent of the six results then available were >1; for one, P<0.005. From the six results combined, it was concluded that 'overall non-smokers have a relative risk of lung cancer due to asbestos that is 1.8 times that of smokers'. Some admitted uncertainty about the figure 1.8 was seized upon and even the thrust of the conclusion has been very largely disregarded. So too has the RAE and all its benefits. As a result, all later reviewers have been led into error, much of it serious: in particular, they have failed to appreciate how much of the variation arises from the inevitable imprecision of all RAEs. This failure led reviewers in 1994 to discard, quite without justification, those interactions which were less than multiplicative and came from cohort studies. Although case-referent studies seemed to support the multiplicative hypothesis, the information from them is essentially unreliable. Thus it cannot weaken the conclusions from the cohort studies, that the multiplicative hypothesis is untenable and that the relative risk of lung cancer from asbestos exposure is about twice as high in non-smokers as in smokers; the best estimate of RAE is 2.04, with 95% confidence interval 1.28-3.25. This finding is not only of high statistical significance but of great social and scientific importance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".