Researchers Find Little Evidence to Support Religion-Health Link In the first and only comprehensive review published by a major medical journal, researchers at P&S found only very weak empirical support for claims that religious faith promotes physical health. The new study applied standards of medical scientific reliability and statistical soundness to previously published studies examining religion and health. At a time of growing interest in introducing religious activity in medicine, the review raises fundamental scientific and ethical questions.The research, reported in the Feb. 20, 1999, issue of Lancet, shows that many previous investigations failed to identify other variables that could account for an apparent link between religious practice and health, such as age, sex, functional capacity, education, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and marital status. "It is critically important that claims of religious activity be subjected to the same rigorous inquiry as any other medical claims," says Dr. Richard P. Sloan, associate professor of psychiatry and director of behavioral medicine. "There is no compelling evidence that religious activities promote health." Dr. Sloan cites one oft-quoted study that showed a positive association between church attendance and health but did not account for the fact that very ill people cannot get to church to be counted. "It was a classic case of failure to control for essential covariates," he says. The authors of this study published a follow-up paper recognizing this, but it is rarely reported. Another common flaw in this literature is assessing so many measures of religious practice and health outcomes that, by chance, two happen to correlate. "Inappropriate statistical methods appear all the time in these sorts of papers," Dr. Sloan says. Yet another limitation of the studies is the murky and many definitions of religious activity, which can range from regular church or synagogue attendance to personal meditation or belief in God. For now, the researchers conclude, physicians shouldn’t tell patients that religious belief can improve health because no scientific evidence shows that this is so. The study’s other authors were Dr. Emilia Bagiella, assistant professor of clinical public health, and Dr. Tia Powell, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry. Reversing Breast Cancer Through Gene Therapy Dr. Paul B. Fisher’s research over the past several years has advanced progress in the fight against cancer, first by identifying new cancer growth suppressor genes that lead to programmed cell death but do not alter other cellular physiology in 1993, then by studying the genes for extended applications. Through this recent work, Dr. Fisher has taken this fight to breast cancer. The latest work by Dr. Fisher, professor of clinical pathology and Michael and Stella Chernow Urological Cancer Research Scientist, extends the application of mda-7, a cancer growth suppressor gene his research team identified in 1996. The researchers showed, in the earlier work, that mda-7 induced growth suppression in human cancer but did not harm normal cells. The present study, reported in the November 1998 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, extends the earlier research by using a replication incompetent adenovirus to express mda-7. When breast cancer cells of different p53 genotypes were infected with the newly expressed gene, Ad.mda-7 S., growth was suppressed in vitro and the cells underwent programmed cell death, or apoptosis. Normal mammary epithelial cells infected with Ad.mda-7 S. maintained their cellular physiology. The research showed that ectopic expression of mda-7 can inhibit tumor growth and progression in breast cancer and cervical cancer cells grown in athymic nude mice. "On the basis of the selective action of mda-7 and its potent cancer cell killing properties, this novel gene offers promise for the gene-based therapy of human cancer," says Dr. Fisher. Dr. Fisher’s research is supported by grants from the NIH, the National Cancer Institute, the Department of Defense, the Samuel Waxman Cancer Foundation, and the Chernow Endowment. Other members of the research team studying mda-7 include Drs. Zao-zhong Su, Malavi T. Madireddi, Jiao Jiao Lin, Charles S.H. Young, Shinichi Kitada, John C. Reed, and Neil I. Goldstein. Microbeam Helps Researcher Learn How Radon Causes Cancer A research team led by Dr. David Brenner, professor of radiation oncology and public health, is learning how ionizing radiation causes genetic mutations by using a microbeam to fire charged alpha particles one at a time at different structures within mammalian cells. A recent experiment indicated that the lung-cancer risk posed by radon in homes may be overestimated. The team took advantage of a newly improved charged-particle microbeam at Columbia University’s Radiological Research Accelerator Facility in Irvington, N.Y. The microbeam can fire a precise number of particles at a cellular target as small as four microns across, less than half the size of an average cell nucleus. The system can irradiate up to 3,000 individual cells per hour. It is the only system in the world capable of such speed and accuracy. Dr. Brenner relied on these capabilities to better understand the cancer risk posed by low levels of radon. Radon is a natural, colorless, and odorless gas that seeps out of some rock formations and can collect in homes. When radon decays, it emits alpha particles, charged particles containing two neutrons and two protons. The National Academy of Sciences has estimated that radon accounts for as many as 21,800 fatal cases of lung cancer per year in the United States. But scientists question those estimates because they were extrapolated from studies of uranium miners exposed to radon at levels much higher than those found in homes. Many of the cells in the miners’ lungs were bombarded by several alpha particles, whereas the lung cells of people living in homes with elevated radon levels are almost never hit by more than one alpha particle. Since cancer often results from the combination of several genetic mutations, many of the cancer cases suffered by the miners may have been the result of several alpha particle hits. People in their homes would not face such a risk. Dr. Brenner and his colleagues used the microbeam to irradiate more than 50,000 cell nuclei with single alpha particles. They found that a single alpha particle passing through the nucleus does not significantly raise the risk of the cell turning cancerous. Although it is a long way from cells in the laboratory to cells in the lung, this suggests that most of the miners’ cancer cases may have been caused by multiple alpha-particle hits, which do not threaten home dwellers. Thus, the linear extrapolation of the miner data down to the homeowner exposure level may overestimate the risk. Those findings were published in the Jan. 5, 1999, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.