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BMJ 2003;327:505 (30 August), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7413.505
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
EditorMore than 140 readers responded to Enstrom and Kabat's paper and Davey Smith's editorial.1 2 Some of the passion and most of the science is captured in the letters above. What follows is a necessarily brief overview of the remaining ones. The debate started with some orthodox critical comment on the paper: the analysis underestimated the risk to passive smokers, was underpowered, distorted, poorly reported, placed out of context, or just plain wrong. The two main contentions were that a smoking spouse is a poor proxy for passive smoking (because everyone smoked in the 1950s, so people with non-smoking spouses were still exposed at work), and that many quitters are misclassified as smokers. Both would reduce the difference in mortality between exposed and non-exposed groups. In general, the criticisms were poorly substantiated; only four letters (3%) referred to actual data in the paper.
The discussions then widened to a number of
Alison Tonks, associate editor
BMJ
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