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Peter N. Lee, MA, CStat
P. N. Lee Statistics and Computing Ltd Sutton, England

JAMA. 1996;275(4):279.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—Ms Barnes and colleagues¹ give the totally false impression that, in 1981, I believed that Hirayama's British Medical Journal article,² which suggested that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) exposure can cause lung cancer in nonsmokers, was "correct." At that time, Mantel³ had suggested, based on a trend analysis of Hirayama's unadjusted data, that Hirayama had confused ² and , thereby considerably overstating the statistical significance of the relationship he had observed between lung cancer risk in nonsmoking women and the extent of smoking by their husbands. I had argued that Hirayama's cited trend value was probably based on age-adjusted data and was likely to be correct. My judgment to the effect that Hirayama was "correct" related solely to this single aspect of statistical methodology. It did not relate to his conclusion, which at that time (as I found when I visited him in . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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