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by cperciva 3702 days ago
massive amount of information

I'm not so sure about that. As a general rule, we don't expose healthy people to large amounts of radiation; so it's hard to separate the effects of the radiation from the effects of whatever caused them to be irradiated.
1 comments
sandworm101 3702 days ago
That depends. Flight crew (pilots and cabin crew) do receive significant radiation. They are a great set to study as they are generally much younger and healthier than the average medical imaging and/or oncology patient.

http://aircrewhealth.com/Topics/hazards/radiation.htm

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cperciva 3702 days ago
Indeed, they're a very interesting exception to the general rule about healthy people not getting significant irradiation. Pilots in particular could be a useful group to study given that they have mandatory medical checks; however, I'm not sure that the sample would be large enough to yield any statistically significant results, even if the privacy issues could be circumvented.

(Also, you run into socioeconomic confounders: Can you find another population which has both the same irregular schedules and the wage scales of pilots?)

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