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Wednesday, July 16, 2003Researchers found that those women who ate the most red meat and high-fat dairy were 33% more likely to develop breast cancer than the women who ate the lowest amounts of those foods. Of course, that's in relative risk, not absolute risk. The study is only available online to subscribers, but the abstract sheds no light on the issue. It, too, hides the results behind "relative risk" assesments. It does, however, provide a glimpse at how small and insignificant this finding is: Dietary fat intake and breast cancer risk were assessed among 90,655 premenopausal women aged 26 to 46 years in 1991. Fat intake was assessed with a food-frequency questionnaire at baseline in 1991 and again in 1995. Breast cancers were self-reported and confirmed by review of pathology reports. Multivariable relative risks (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated. All statistical tests were two-sided. Results: During 8 years of follow-up, 714 women developed incident invasive breast cancer. To begin with, the estimate of fat intake was based on a survey - a notoriously unreliable method of gathering information. (scroll up for link). Then, out of 90,655 women, only 714 developed breast cancer. That's 0.007%. And the final kicker, the difference between the highest fat eaters and the lowest fat eaters, even in relative risk, was only 33%, an amount that's not usually considered statistically significant. "So, what?" say the researchers. They're not going to let the publicity gold mine of a study combining the media's two favorite health topics - fat and cancer - go unplumbed: "What this study says is diet counts," said Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society. The 33% increased risk means that about one in every 20 cases of breast cancer is caused by animal-fat intake in young adult women, said Patrick Remington, a professor of public health at the University of Wisconsin Medical School. That could be up to 10,000 women this year, based on the cancer society's estimate of breast cancer diagnoses in U.S. women. Epidemiologists generally consider a relative risk factor of 33% to be small. But even a small risk could become an important public health concern, Remington said. The recipe for modern medical research success: Take a handful of research subjects. Sprinkle with a pinch of differences in outcome. Combine with unreliable data. For leavening, multiply by the U.S. population. Mix liberally with experts who haven't read the study. And there you have it...... media significance. posted by Sydney on 7/16/2003 06:27:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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