COMMENTARY

Japanese spousal study: a response to Professor Yano’s claims

P N Lee

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Mr Peter Lee
P N Lee Statistics and Computing Ltd, 17 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5DA, UK; PeterLee@pnlee.demon.co.uk

Keywords: environmental tobacco smoke; ETS; lung cancer; smoking misclassification; confounding

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

I agree with Yano that scientific integrity should be maintained and researchers be free from pressure from commercial and campaigning interests. I disagree that I have caused any "distortion of scientific findings" or "misrepresentation and misappropriation" of results, serious charges which I will show are unjustified. To clarify the situation I will start with the history preceding the study.

In 1981 Hirayama reported an increased lung cancer risk in non-smoking women married to smokers.¹ Following this I demonstrated random misclassification of smokers as non-smokers, coupled with smokers tending to marry smokers, leads to an observed increased risk even when environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) has no effect.^2,3 The tobacco industry then agreed to support a study in England of this "misclassification bias", using cotinine to validate smoking, which was reported in 1987.⁴ I also reviewed evidence on misclassification,⁵ revealing the lack of useful data in Japan, where cultural differences might affect . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Yano, E (2005). Should a paper with erroneous interpretations based on invalid measurements be published?. Tobacco Control 14: 431-432 [Full Text]  
• Lee, P N (2005). Response to E Yano and S Chapman. Tobacco Control 14: 430-431 [Full Text]  
• Chapman, S (2005). Research from tobacco industry affiliated authors: need for particular vigilance. Tobacco Control 14: 217-219 [Full Text]