Living near big power line may up Alzheimer's risk

[Celebration]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29038168/

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older people living within 50 meters of major power lines are at increased risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease or senile dementia, research from Switzerland shows.

The risk increased steadily with the amount of time a person had been living in close proximity to a 220-380 kV power line, Dr. Anke Huss of the University of Bern and colleagues found. These are extra-high voltage lines used for long-distance transmission of large amounts of electricity.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,snip...............

Overall, Huss and her colleagues found, people living within 50 meters of a 220-380 kV power line were 1.24 times more likely to die of Alzheimer's disease than those living at least 600 meters away from these power lines.

People who lived for at least 5 years near a 220-380 kV power line were at a 1.51-fold increased risk. For people who lived close to a large power line for at least a decade, risk increased by a factor of 1.78, while it was doubled for those who had been living near a power line for at least 15 years. Results were similar when the researchers looked at deaths from senile dementia.

[oldnslo]

1. Switzerland, shitzerland--another researcher wants name in print.

[Celebration]

2. What a thoughtful reply............

:sarcasm:

One would think that Duers could refrain from xenophobia......oops, guess not.

[Stellabella]

3. Doesn't surprise me.

I think those thing are dangerous. And the only way to find out if research is done properly is if it's been vetted and published. There's no such thing as 'researchers wanting to get their names in print'. If a study has value, it's printed. If not, not.

[NOW tense]

4. Power lines mess with your thinker. n/t

[Jim__]

5. The full journal article is available online.

Here - from the American Journal of Epidemiology.

[Davis_X_Machina]

6. 50 meters...150 feet.

...is awfully close, for a line of that voltage. You routinely get a couple hundred feet easement for comparable lines, at least around here. I'd need more convincing.

[uppityperson]

7. The longer they live in cheap sub-housing next to power lines,

the more apt they are to have....?

That was my thought. If they are living in housing that close, wondering why and what other risks they have.

[Why Syzygy]

8. I haven't been able to find anything online to illustrate..

but in Vegas, our apartment (nice) complex sat on basically the same property with a big bank of power lines and towers. There was another one about a block off the strip adjacent to a hotel/casino. It may depend a lot on the geography of the region as to how close the proximity.

[cosmik debris]

9. Correlation does NOT equal causation.

That doesn't get said often enough in this forum.

And apparently a lot of people either don't understand or don't believe it.

[Celebration]

10. ???

Just because epidemiological studies are done, doesn't mean that the authors don't know the difference between correlation and causation.

Of course, epidemioligical studies are actually done for a reason-- that reason is to ferret out possible causes for problems.

I'm not sure how one could actually do a randomized blind study on this topic, but they could control for other factors, such as socioeconomic ones.

[cosmik debris]

11. It's just not good science.

This study appears to ignore many factors that are of equal or greater importance than proximity to power lines.

For example, people who live near power lines are more likely to be in the lower socio-economic classes. They probably have less education, a poorer diet, get less exercise, visit the doctor less frequently, are more likely to smoke or drink heavily, and are exposed to more urban environmental toxins.

The group that lived a significant distance from power lines would include rural residents who get more exercise and are not exposed to urban environmental toxins. It would also include the higher socio-economic classes who take better care of themselves and eat better.

My reading of this study convinces me that they were trying to find a correlation rather than a cause.

This study does not test the hypothesis that power lines cause neuro-degenerative disease, It just looks for a correlation to support the hypothesis. When you look for evidence to support your hypothesis, that's bad science.

[Celebration]

12. why would those factors be different

for those living 60 meters from them? This is epidemiology, not blinded studies.

Apparently those living even marginally over 50 meters away had very little increased risk.

Anyway, you are making assumptions about the other factors. You don't have any science to back that up either.

[cosmik debris]

13. The study does not justify any conclusion about power lines

except that they occur in the same area as neuro-degenerative diseases.

To reach a valid conclusion you need to compare similar groups. This study did not do that.

It is just bad science.

[HamdenRice]

14. Don't worry, certain people will scream "bad science" without reading or understanding methodology

For one thing, in Europe, there is a less hierarchical property market -- which is to say that their legal system does not segregate people and property by class and market price as rigidly as we do here. Utilities, therefore, tend to be situated more according to the public good than purely by value of property. Moreover, the study adjusted for socio-economic factors.

But don't take my word for it. The study says:

<quote>

We used age as the underlying timescale in our models. All models were adjusted for sex; educational level (compulsory education, secondary level, and tertiary level); highest reported occupational attainment by code (4 levels extracted from the International Standard Classification of Occupations of 1988—1) legislators, senior officials, managers, and professionals, 2) technicians and associate professionals, clerks, service workers, and shop and market sales workers, 3) skilled agricultural and fishery workers, craft and related trades workers, plant, machine operators, and assemblers, and elementary occupations, and 4) no occupation reported); civil status (single, married, divorced, widowed); urbanization category (city, agglomeration, rural municipality); and language region (German, French, Italian). We also included the number of apartments per building into the model, a potential risk factor for magnetic field exposure due to indoor wiring (8).

Finally, because Alzheimer's disease might be associated with benzene exposure, we adjusted models for living within 50 m of a major road. We extracted proximity of the buildings to the "major road network" using data from the Swiss TeleAtlas database for this purpose. The major roads network includes motorways and motorway exits, as well as "major roads of high importance": nearly 8,700 km with 7% of the population exposed to major roads in the 50-m corridor. In sensitivity analyses, we repeated analyses for persons aged less than 85 years, by sex, and examined whether results differed between deaths where Alzheimer's disease or senile dementia had been coded as the primary or concomitant cause of death.

<end quote>

The poster/heckler in question simply doesn't believe in statistics and probability and so screams, "bad science" any time epidemiological studies are posted without actually reading (and certainly without understanding) the methodology.

[Celebration]

15. Thanks

"Bad science" is not generally published in major journals, although sometimes there are monetary factors involved. And, epidemiology is epidemiology. One can't attack it on that basis.