Air Force fighter pilots face an increased risk of testicular and prostate cancers, though the exact reason why can not be determined.
My Bold
Many years ago on a uni course we were given a study demonstrating the statistical link between owning a telephone (a landline, not a mobile, this was early eighties
) and getting cancer. It was of course, intentionally, hokum. The purpose was to demonstrate the illusions of cause and effect from casual use of statistics.
I note the study period is 1970 to 2004, that's my era, and the era of many folk on here, so its hardly contentious to point out that study sample is going to include a massive majority of old-school military aviators.
In population percentage terms, you going to have a massive bias towards hard-living, party-animal, heavy drinking, red-meat eating, sexually promiscuous, alpha males. How many teetotal vegans do think there will be amongst those 34K last century fighter pilots.
The comparison group (400K+) non-flying military males, could be a little apples and oranges in terms of lifestyle/career profiles. Common sense suggests civilian aircrew/cabin crew would have been a far better comparison group???? (Probably a resource issue stopping that happening.)
If you follow the links and read the study, a very different picture starts to emerge (so often the case as public media so often cherry picks studies to create headlines and readership).
The issues I refer to are detailed in the sections covering "confounding issues" and it pretty upfront that most of it is unknown/undetermined. It also noticeably steers aways from the socially politically "near the knuckle stuff". They have focus on the vietnam era and the F100. I'm thinking booze, shagging, smoking and terrible diet would have been off the clock amongst that cohort. Agent Orange gets a mention as well.
Two other things to note. The overall incidence of all type sof cancer are lower than the population average, so its far from all bad news (the study points out that fighter pilots are a healthy bunch out the box, which again we all know). And that there have been huge swings in the incidence of some of the cancers types over certain quite narrow periods of time, which they admit is yet another significant confusing factor.
tl/dr
Read the whole study. It does not appear that alarming.
In summary, the findings of this study do not justify wholesale changes to cancer preventionrecommendations for U.S. Air Force fighter aviators.
it does appear massively inconclusive and throws up any number of holes:
Because of contradictory evidence in the literature, the tenuous associations in this study thatcould be explained by unmeasured confounding, and the potential for medical interventions to
cause harm (e.g., screening exams leading to unnecessary biopsies), our results do not justify new universal cancer screening recommendations for fighter aviators.
I was once told by a very high ranking academic that the true purpose of all studies was to recommend that more study is needed. That appears to be the case here.
A sensitivity analysis excluding F-100 aviators suggested that particularfighter airframes, not the occupation of fighter aviation, may be more predictive of certain canceroutcomes. Further studies are recommended to elicit airframe factors that may contribute to thesedifferences in cancer incidence and mortality.