Hundreds in study to get news of thyroid ills

A University of Utah study examining a possible connection between fallout and thyroid disorders is ending early — and most of the 20 scientists and administrators will be laid off by the end of June.

But before the work is done, adds its director, hundreds of people must be informed their exams showed signs of thyroid disease.

There are a lot of thyroid abnormalities, said the director, Dr. Joseph Lyon of the University of Utah. Researchers had examined about 1,700 of a planned 4,500 people, mostly from southwestern Utah,

"We identified several hundred cases of disease," Lyon said.

Disease can cover a range of problems, from benign thyroid nodules to cancer. Lyon did not offer details of the findings.

But he said the people will need to find physicians concerning their problems. Informing them is an ethical requirement, he believes.

"In medicine it's called abandonment" if patients aren't told. "So we have to notify several hundred individuals they have problems and will need follow-up," he said..

In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, said it would no longer fund Lyon's latest study, which had cost $8 million and continued for 3 1/2 years.

In an April 5 letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Dr. Julie Louise Gerberding, director of the CDC, wrote, "The scientific quality of the study was questioned by external scientific reviews . . . Both reviews focused on the lack of scientifically defensible dosimetry, power and treatment of uncertainty. Those issues form the foundation upon which the study is based."

Lyon and his associates have challenged those points in detail. He has sent two letters to the CDC official, one outlining the researchers' position in detail.

The study was a sequel to research by Lyon, starting in 1977, that demonstrated fallout from open-air atomic tests in Nevada during the 1950s and early '60s caused cancer downwind. His 1979 report in the New England Journal of Medicine and a later review on leukemia prompted Congress to pass a fallout compensation bill.

In a 1993 study, Lyon and colleagues found that radioactivity from the blasts at the Nevada Test Site had increased the incidence of thyroid tumors at 3.4 times the expected rate among schoolchildren exposed to the highest levels of fallout.