ArticleGlobal epidemiology2026
Limitations of evaluating risks of all cancers combined in etiological epidemiology research.
Article in Global epidemiology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was the first public health agency to conclude that an agent - in this case, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) - could be carcinogenic based on associations with all cancers combined, even though there were no consistent associations with any particular cancer type. Most types of cancer each represent an etiologically distinct disease. Epidemiology associations with all cancers combined may be false-positive findings, which lack biological meaning and do not adequately consider confounders, or could mask true associations with specific and/or rare cancer types. We propose that, if investigators report results of etiological analyses with all cancers or groups of etiologically distinct cancers (or other diseases), they consider the heterogenous nature of cancer and that their observations are hypothesis-generating statistical associations without an immediate mechanistic inference.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.