Reply to Compton et al.: Paradoxical misunderstanding

Compton et al.( 1 ) (CEA) claim that Peto's Paradox (PP) suggests cancer risk should correlate with body size (BS) and that our findings ( 2 ) do not refute this owing to a "modest positive correlation."However, the established understanding of PP, supported by substantial literature (including CEA's work), predicts that any such relationship would refute PP ( 3 -9 ).We report a significant association, not just a correlation, which is important given our use of a nonlinear Poisson regression model.The R 2 values for this association range from 0.445 to 0.616.We are unclear how CEA concluded that our association is "modest."CEA make several other incorrect assumptions about our study, leading to their unsupported conclusions: