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Old Mon Jul 18, 2011, 06:37 PM
Neil Cuadra Neil Cuadra is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Los Angeles, California
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It would be wonderful to know the causes of AA across the population so that preventive measures could be taken. For example, if they knew that a particular pesticide presented a high risk of causing AA they could restrict its use, fund research into replacements for it, issue warnings about limiting exposure, outlaw it, or study the pesticide's chemical properties to learn what mechanism leads to AA.

Medical researchers can gather data to find suspected causes statistically. If AA occurs more often than average among workers in a particular industry or among residents in a certain neighborhood, they can zero in on what those people have in common. They can even keeps stats on patients treated for a disease or condition with one recognized treatment vs. another, e.g., studying whether AA is more or less common when a bacterial infection is treated with chloramphenicol vs. streptomycin vs. tetracycline.

The main problem limiting this research is that they can't do trials of potential causes. For example, it wouldn't be ethical to expose 50 patients to chloramphenicol and 50 patients to placebos just to see if the first patients get AA more often. So they can't prove in that way that a given exposure, substance, or drug is a direct cause of aplastic anemia.
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