Comprehensive Epidemiologic Data Resource

The Comprehensive Epidemiologic Data Resource (CEDR) is the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) electronic database comprised of health studies of DOE contract workers and environmental studies of areas surrounding DOE facilities. DOE recognizes the benefits of data sharing and supports the public’s right to know about worker and community health risks. CEDR provides independent researchers and the public with access to de-identified data collected since the Department’s early production years. CEDR’s holdings include more than 80 studies of more than one million workers. CEDR is a national user facility, with a large audience for data that are not available elsewhere.

Most of CEDR’s holdings are derived from epidemiologic studies of DOE workers at many large nuclear weapons plants, such as Hanford, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Savannah River Site, and Rocky Flats. These studies primarily use death certificate information to identify excess deaths and patterns of disease among workers to determine what factors contribute to the risk of developing cancer and other illnesses. In addition, many of these studies have radiation exposure measurements on individual workers. Other CEDR collections include historical dose reconstruction studies of past offsite radiologic and chemical exposures around the nuclear weapons facilities. Now a mature system in routine operational use, CEDR’s modern, Internet-based systems respond to thousands of requests to its Web server daily.

CEDR’s library of information, reports, journal articles, and data includes nearly 10,000 citations/documents. CEDR’s bibliographic search feature allows the user to select citations or publications associated with the studies found in the CEDR library.

CEDR’s data collection -- There are two types of data derived from epidemiologic studies:

1) Analytic data files: contain the data that a researcher directly used in conducting the analyses and result in reported findings or publication in a peer-reviewed journal. CEDR’s holdings include more than 200 analytic files.

2) Working data files: files that contain the raw or unedited data from which a researcher selected variables to form an initial analytic data file set. The data in the working data files may contain errors; as such, it is recommended that they be analyzed and results interpreted with caution. There are more than 100 working data files in CEDR’s holdings.