Breast cancer, which markedly increases with age, is the most common cancer among women in the U.S. About one in twenty American women can expect to develop breast cancer during their lifetime [2]. Less than 25% of breast cancers are found in pre-meno-pausal women [3]. Risk factors for breast cancer in postmenopausal women include age, age at menarche, parity, lactation, age at menopause, diet and calorie intake, obesity, Li-Fraumeni syndrome, family history of breast cancer, height, history of benign breast disease, radiation exposure, prior oral contraceptive use, hormone replacement therapy, and alcohol intake [4–7]. The epidemiology of breast cancer has been widely studied [8].
Breast cancer risk and radiation dose from populations exposed to occupational, medical, and environmental sources of ionizing radiation were obtained from 67 epidemiologi-cal studies (Appendix Table A10.1). A great deal of heterogeneity was evident in the pooled data, probably due to imprecision in determining the role of confounding factors. All studies in which breast doses were <10 mSv showed evidence of radiation hormesis. Studies in which breast doses were from >10 mSv to <100 mSv showed breast cancer RR values that were evenly distributed above and below the RR = 1.0 line. Only at breast doses >100 mSv were breast cancer RR values mostly >1.0 (Fig. 10.1).
“The LNT is dying…. We must accelerate its death because it is a deleterious and costly model” (Maurice Tubiana).
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(2010). Breast Cancer. In: Sanders, C.L. (eds) Radiation Hormesis and the Linear-No-Threshold Assumption. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03720-7_10
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