Out of curiosity, I chose one cancer from the article: breast cancer. Deaths declined from a peak of 33 to 19.1 per 100k women, whereas smoking only seems to increase your risk modestly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5698948/
> The HR (reference group was never smokers) was 1.14 (95% CI 1.03–1.25; P = 0.010) for ever smokers, 1.24 (95% CI 1.08–1.43; P = 0.002) for starting smoking at ages < 17 years, and 1.23 (1.07–1.41; P = 0.004) for starting smoking 1–4 years after menarche.
However smoking rates have gone down massively since the '50s:
> Ever/never chest X-ray exposure increases BC risk 2-fold regardless of age at first exposure and, by up to 5-fold when carrying 3 or more rare variants in a DNA repair gene.
Digital x-rays have largely replaced film, and they can reduce radiation exposure by 80-90%.
> The HR (reference group was never smokers) was 1.14 (95% CI 1.03–1.25; P = 0.010) for ever smokers, 1.24 (95% CI 1.08–1.43; P = 0.002) for starting smoking at ages < 17 years, and 1.23 (1.07–1.41; P = 0.004) for starting smoking 1–4 years after menarche.
However smoking rates have gone down massively since the '50s:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/237908/smoking-rate-hits-new-lo...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-the-prevalence...
Also something that absolutely does seem to raise your risk of breast cancer is chest x-rays:
https://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...
> Ever/never chest X-ray exposure increases BC risk 2-fold regardless of age at first exposure and, by up to 5-fold when carrying 3 or more rare variants in a DNA repair gene.
Digital x-rays have largely replaced film, and they can reduce radiation exposure by 80-90%.
So I'm not sure one way or the other.