Talk:Cervical rib

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[edit] Cervical ribs and Cancer

An anonymous editor removed a paragraph that I had added which had included facts directly relevant to cervical ribs which had ncluded a proper citation. The editor included no explanatory comment for his deletion. For the time being I have reverted those changes back to my previous revision. I'm certainly willing to discussion this revision if the editor can produce a citation that refutes these facts, or if the editor feels that these facts are not relevant to the topic of cervical ribs. Scott Roy Atwood (talk) 17:24, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Yo check your facts bud. If you actually look at studies, instead of just blogs, you'll see that a human born with a cervical rib has 125 times the risk of cancer, but the incidence of cancer happens at very young ages, leading to a higher death rate at this young age. If someone with a cervical rib survives beyond infancy, there is no evidence that there is an increased cancer risk. The fact seems as though it should be removed all together, as this is the case with many recessive mutations. You really should be careful before posting misleading facts like that, what happens if somebody who has a cervical rib reads the article and sees this misleading fact? I'm no wikipedian, but it wasnt hard to find that your statistic was misleading, just do a basic websearch for hox mutatations, and scholarly articles come up that show the actual math that leads to "125 percent increase". So go ahead and fix the error, and be more careful in the future. Word.

Thank you for the clarification. I have updated the article to reflect the more accurate description of the statistic regarding cancer. I would still argue that this the fact that this condition may be related to mutations of a Hox gene, and the relationship to cancer are deserving of inclusion in an encyclopedia article on this topic. Rather than removing mention of cancer everywhere, perhaps all conditions that are associated with higher incidence of childhood cancer should mention that fact. Remember, people come to Wikipedia for all kinds of information. Some people might come to this article to learn about a medical condition, others to learn something about developmental biology. And certainly for the later, and possibly for the former, the incidence of childhood cancer due to Hox mutation is relevant. Scott Roy Atwood (talk) 16:50, 21 April 2008 (UTC)