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Epidemiologist who quantified how smoking kills and invented the meta-analysis methods that established adjuvant cancer therapy.
Richard Peto co-authored with Richard Doll the 50-year follow-up of British doctors showing smokers lose about ten years of life and that stopping at any age helps, and has quantified tobacco deaths worldwide. He founded the Early Breast Cancer Trialists' Collaborative Group and developed the statistical methods for individual-patient-data meta-analysis, and co-designed the large simple trial. He was knighted for services to epidemiology.
Chemotherapy works in receptor-negative disease at least as well as in receptor-positive disease in proportional terms, and because triple-negative absolute risk is high the absolute gain is large; this is why anthracycline and taxane backbone survived into KEYNOTE-522 and why SCARLET now asks whether the anthracycline can go.
Smoking is the single largest preventable cause of cancer death, and quitting at any age helps, with the greatest gain from quitting young. Cessation support belongs in every cancer service, including lung screening programmes.
The single most quotable number in tobacco control: quitting at 30 avoids almost all the risk, quitting at 50 avoids half of it, and it is never not worth stopping. It is also the argument for putting cessation support inside a lung screening appointment rather than beside it.
The methodological ancestor of modern cancer epidemiology. Cohort design, exposure recorded before outcome, and a dose-response relationship measured rather than asserted: this is the template every later study of a cancer risk factor follows.
Doll and Hill's 1950 study is where the evidence that smoking causes cancer begins. Everything from cigarette warnings and tax to smoke-free laws and lung screening eligibility descends from this study and the cohort that followed it.
Shares Doll and Hill 1950: the case-control study that tied smoking to lung cancer, Fifty years of the British Doctors Study: smokers lose ten years of life, quitting gives most of it back, Non-small-cell lung cancer.
Shares Oxford Cancer (Oxford University Hospitals and University of Oxford), HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer and the tag meta-analysis.
Shares The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits; a preliminary report, Doll and Hill 1950: the case-control study that tied smoking to lung cancer, Non-small-cell lung cancer.
Shares Smoking, smoking cessation, and lung cancer in the UK since 1950: combination of national statistics with two case-control studies, The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits; a preliminary report, Doll and Hill 1950: the case-control study that tied smoking to lung cancer, Fifty years of the British Doctors Study: smokers lose ten years of life, quitting gives most of it back.
Shares Fifty years of the British Doctors Study: smokers lose ten years of life, quitting gives most of it back, Non-small-cell lung cancer.
Shares HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer and the tag epidemiology.
Shares Non-small-cell lung cancer and the tag epidemiology.
Shares Comparisons between different polychemotherapy regimens for early breast cancer: meta-analyses of long-term outcome among 100,000 women in 123 randomised trials, Triple-negative breast cancer roadmap: from a remainder defined by three negative tests to immunotherapy, antibody-drug conjugates and the residual disease problem.