COMARE Holding Statement on the Nuclear Industry Family Study (NIFS)
In its Second and Third Reports, COMARE recommended that studies should be set up to consider any possible effects on the health of the offspring of parents occupationally exposed to radiation. The Department of Health (DH) and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) provided funding for two major epidemiological studies. Prior to the setting up of these studies, Gardner et al published a study suggesting that occupational exposure of fathers to ionising radiation before conception of a child raised the risk of subsequent development of leukaemia or non-Hodgkin lymphoma in those children. Following publication of this study COMARE made further recommendations for biological research to address the "Gardner hypothesis" and stated that both the epidemiological studies already recommended should be designed to test this hypothesis. In 1990 DH and HSE jointly established the Coordinating Committee on Health Aspects of Radiation Research (CCHARR) to manage these research programmes.
The first of the two epidemiological studies, known as the "Linkage Study" was published in 1997. The second (The Nuclear Industry Family Study (NIFS)) has just been published. It shows that the cancer incidence in the 46,107 offspring of workers included in NIFS was similar to that in the general population. This is a reassuring result and indicates that cancer (including leukaemia) is not a major public health problem associated with the children of employees in the nuclear industry. There are, however, aspects of both the Linkage Study and the NIFS that deserve further detailed consideration. In some instances they concern analyses carried out with very small numbers of cases and should be properly treated with some caution. We therefore propose, as requested by Government, to consider both epidemiological studies and the results of biological research carried out under the auspices of CCHARR in the light of other relevant research. This topic will be the subject of our Seventh Report which we hope to publish later this year.
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