Air Force fighter pilots face an increased risk of testicular and prostate cancers
 

Bad news :(


https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...cer/ar-AAPWz5w

Duh….

They spend a lot of time above the protective effects of the lower atmosphere and absorb more radiation. Far less, of course, than airline air and cabin crew, so a lower risk.

it would be interesting to see if there is a direct correlation to the hours flown….

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30585313/

RADAR side effect?
 

Interesting RADAR correlation and medical issues; during briefings BUFF crewmembers sat by position (P,CP,RN,N,EW,G) Observing from the back, the Radar Nav, Navs and Gunners were at various levels of hair loss. Obviously not the same medical issue but wonder if the AF tracked BUFF Crew dogs in their study.

I had the opportunity in the 90s to attend a briefing with Research Engineers working on helmet visors to counter LASER issues. In several conversations with them they related medical issues within their department and staff that worked on RADAR projects.

Used to be because of the unhealthy, overwhelming amount of sexual activity involved with being a fighter pilot.

Allegedly, some of it even involved other people…..:E

A headline like that is just an invitation to banter.
Excessive size of equipment to begin with - combined with compression effect of speed jeans and hard seat pan in high-g turns?

The melanoma could be a direct response to all the beach volleyball they play?

Salute!

I always thot that pulling all the gees might concentrate bad things down low. And then there were all the cosmic rays up in the stratosphere, heh heh.

I tink the rrohids were more of a problem due to the gees and such.....

Gums sends...

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.


it does appear massively inconclusive and throws up any number of holes:






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.

PS

Just to be clear, I'm not dissing the study in anyway whatsoever. I'm saying if you want to understand it, you need to read it. :)

As distinct from a 'talk-asm'?

CG

Pshaw! Don't start that malarky!:= There'll be know-alls everywhere on here. Oh, wait...

CG

The headline was simply copied over from the post as it seemed to hit the mark.

You don't thing its anything to do with the amount of radium used on the dials of your big firke orf watches?

There is a curious passage in the "Limitations" section. My main thought as I was reading it was that they were doing a lot of independent tests and that the p-value correction (for multiple comparisons) must be eating up a lot of their power. It turns out that they hadn't adjusted the tests at all. They write: "Had we adjusted the alpha level for multiple comparisons, we may have obtained fewer “statistically significant” results but at the expense of increasing the false negative (or missed discovery) risk. In our judgment, false positives would be less concerning than false negatives."

No real criticism of the authors as they are open about the methods, but if your aim is to avoid false negatives, then why not just choose a higher threshold for the family-wise error rate? The results would at least be a lot more intuitive to the reader. I suspect that this approach wouldn't pass review if submitted to a journal, though possibly the purpose of this report was slightly different to an academic study.

I also wonder whether a false positive would really be less concerning if it were being described to a former fighter pilot!

Thankfully, on the Tornado F3 the RADAR was mainly broken or concrete ballast…







…Joke! :}

Well along in years, I quit going to doctors for 'diagnostic care' many years ago for exactly these reasons. Let it surprise me.

Almost 2000 hours in the F-100 and played a lot of beach volleyball in Santa Monica, but I don't think my $9.99 Coleman watch had any radium on it. You can never be too careful.

Some of it even involved more than one other person. :}

Salute!

Good to see okie post here.

If I ran an insurance company for old farts, I would love those pilots that passed physicals for thirty years that most folks would have flunked. Just the first exams failed many wannabe jocks. The guy in front of me at Pensacola medical exam had a problem, and I got an appointment to Annapolis a week later. Then, another day or two I got the USAFA appointment.

Most of my friends that started with me back in the sixties and went west either got shot down or got some weird cancer and died. Lost two roomies just this past year, and not due to the stoopid virus.

Just as with the climate studies, the authors of this one ask for more $$$ to do another study.

Gums sends...

Any Biologist will tell you that: Correlation does not prove Causation.

I wonder...
Is the incidence of testicular cancer somehow related to the self-percieved size of the testicles?
And prostrate troubles due perhaps (!) to the excess flatulence their career path seems to produce?

So it’s all a load of bollocks?