Statistical validation of extended thyroid ultrasound screening among residents of the chornobyl nuclear power plant region.

We performed a regression analysis on previously published thyroid ultrasound data from residents living near the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Zabirova et al. 2024). Five standard equations (linear, exponential, logarithmic, power, and sigmoid) were tested to quantify the relationship between age and the incidence of Category “B” thyroid ultrasound findings. While all models yielded similar coefficients of determination (R2) within the studied age range, their extrapolations diverged significantly with increasing age. We show that extending the dataset to include older age groups is necessary to identify the most appropriate predictive model, which would be crucial for projecting long-term thyroid cancer risk in populations exposed to radiation, including those impacted by the Fukushima nuclear incident.