Radon exposure and risk of neurodegenerative diseases among male miners in Ontario, Canada: A cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Environmental radon has been examined as a risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases in a small number of previous studies, but the findings have been inconsistent. This study aims to investigate the association between occupational radon exposure and neurodegenerative disease in a cohort of male miners with work experience in multiple ore types in Ontario, Canada. METHODS: Radon exposure (1915-1988) was assessed using two job-exposure matrices (JEM) constructed from using historical records for 34,536 Ontario male miners. Neurodegenerative outcomes were ascertained between 1992 and 2018. Poisson regression models were used to estimate incidence rate ratios (RR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) between cumulative radon exposure in working level months (WLM) and each neurodegenerative outcome. RESULTS: Levels of cumulative radon exposure showed variability among cohort members with a mean of 7.5 WLM (standard deviation 24.4). Miners in uranium mines or underground jobs had higher levels and more variability in exposure than workers in non-uranium work or surface jobs. Compared to the reference group (radon < 1 WLM), increased rates of Alzheimer's (RR 1.23, 95% CI 1.05-1.45) and Parkinson's disease (RR 1.43, 95% CI 1.08-1.89) were observed among workers with >1-5 WLM and >5-10 WLM, respectively, but not among higher exposed workers (>10 WLM). CONCLUSION: This study did not observe a positive monotonic dose-response relationship between cumulative radon exposure and Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease in Ontario mining workers. There was no association observed with motor neuron disease.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".