Radiation epidemiology

The effect of latency periods on cancer risk estimation is under study in our laboratory. Insofar as cancer incidences and radiation doses are concerned, effort is made to ascertain these with the greatest reliability, although problems arise, particularly in attempts to reconstruct the events of exposure many years prevously. The matter of the long latent periods begs the important issue of how to project into the future the risk of cancer induced in individuals exposed at the present time, or depriving a projection model appropriate for predicting how induced cancers will express themselves in time following exposure. Two risk-projection models which are generally used by radiation epidemiologists are discussed