Nuclear (worker) study finds link to heart disease

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ccac92d8-ea57-11dc-b3c9-0000779fd2ac.html

A big study of nuclear workers has suggested an unexpectedly strong link between radiation exposure and heart disease.

The study, published yesterday, analysed health records and radiation doses for 65,000 people employed at four nuclear sites - Sellafield, Capenhurst and Springfields, in north-west England, and Chaplecross in south-west Scotland - between 1946 and 2005.

Scientists from Westlakes Consulting, a non-profit research organisation in Cumbria, found a strong statistical association between increasing radiation and diseases of the heart and circulation, stronger than the better known link between occupational exposure and cancer. The probability of the association being coincidental was less than one in a thousand, said Steve Jones, the project leader. But he urged caution in interpreting the results, which are published online by the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Prof Jones said: "We have not been able to take account of all the other possible causes of circulatory system disease . . . The possible biological mechanisms that might explain a link with radiation are tentative at best, and so the results of our analysis are not consistent with any simple causal interpretation."

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