An evaluation of exposure metrics in an epidemiologic study on radio and television broadcast transmitters and the risk of childhood leukemia.

Electric field strength values calculated by wave propagation modeling were applied as an exposure metric in a case–control study conducted in Germany to investigate a possible association between radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) emitted from television and radio broadcast transmitters and the risk of childhood leukemia. To validate this approach it was examined at 850 measurement sites whether calculated RF-EMF are an improvement to an exposure proxy based on distance from the place of residence to a transmitter. Further, the agreement between measured and calculated RF-EMF was explored. For dichotomization at the 90% quantiles of the exposure distributions it was found that…