Science + Media = Bad News

The media seems to love scientific studies. Every week there seems to be a story on the local news about a new study telling us about how to reduce the risk of heart disease or cancer, or some other disease. Unfortunately, the news story invariably distorts the study’s results, doles out some dubious advice, and does a general disservice to their audience…

For example, recently I happened across a WebMD article entitled “Drinking coffee may extend life”. The first paragraph of the article reads:

“Coffee drinkers, rejoice. While you might be using it for a “pick-me-up,” coffee may also be extending your life.”

From this headline, your initial reaction might be:

Coffee’s good for you; it would probably benefit everyone to go out and drink coffee.

Unfortunately this assumption is pretty far from the truth. For example, further down in the article you get a quote from one of the study’s authors:

“We can’t say from this one study that coffee extends your life, but it does appear that it doesn’t increase the risk for death for people who are healthy,”

Wow, coffee doesn’t increase the risk of death for people who are healthy! That’s encouraging…

If you look up the actual study in the Annals of Internal Medicine – “The Relationship of Coffee Consumption with Mortality”, their official conclusion is:

“Regular coffee consumption was not associated with an increased mortality rate in either men or women. The possibility of a modest benefit of coffee consumption on all-cause and CVD mortality needs to be further investigated.”

Hmm… We seem to be getting further and further away from our initial assumption; maybe the devil really is in the details. Looking at the details of the study, I think an appropriate summary of their findings would be:

For those with no history of heart disease or cancer, over 20 years, your risk of dying of heart disease may drop by up to 20% in men and 25% in women, if you drink coffee.

The study doesn’t tell us anything about:

• Benefits to those that already have heart disease or cancer
• Benefits to those who aren’t at risk of heart disease
• Whether coffee increases the risk of dying of something else
• Whether coffee may negatively affect your health in other ways

So, now that we’ve correctly interpreted the study’s results, do we actually believe them? I don’t…

Why does coffee reduce the risk of heart disease? We can guess, but in reality, we have no idea whether coffee actually lowers the risk of heart disease or not, or whether these numbers are due to something else. The authors of this study don’t either. They weren’t working in a lab looking at samples through microscopes, they were crunching numbers in a computer. As I’ll discuss further next week, this is not an effective way to study diseases.

Bottom line, take your coffee (and the results of studies such as these), with a grain of salt…

[Image: www.stockvault.net]

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