Making lemons from lemonade
Scare story, via AP:
Heart disease kills more women under 45 — For decades, heart disease death rates have been falling. But a new study shows a troubling turn — more women under 45 are dying of heart disease due to clogged arteries, and the death rate for men that age has leveled off. Heart experts aren’t sure what went wrong, but they think increasing rates of obesity and other risk factors are to blame.
The rates will have to be monitored to see if this is the beginning of a real trend. But if the data holds, the new study may be an early glimpse of the impact of escalating obesity and diabetes on U.S. deaths
What is not reported until the end of the story: “the increase amounts to roughly 100 added deaths a year of women in that age group. That’s a relatively small impact in the entire U.S. population.” No kidding.
This story jumps on data that may or may not be “the beginning of a real trend,” and a minuscule trend at that, if it even exists. The media are faster to report on some trends rather than others, it seems.
November 20th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Circa one hundred per year? Still, rates for men continued to drop a bit (-0.5%) while for women there was an increase (+1.5%). Odd. Anecdotally, I would have thought women were the more likely to be living according to what we have been told is healthy for us.
But then, the report notes that smoking has continued to decrease, cholesterol counts have continued to decline, there has been a “decrease in the proportion of U.S. adults who are totally sedentary during leisure time,” and an “increasingly wide use of evidence-based therapies such as angioplasty, thrombolysis, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, statins, and antiplatelet agents,” and more other medicines. So of course, the recommended response is to increase efforts against smoking, and for exercise, and against cholesterol – even as these efforts are successful but more women are dying…
November 21st, 2007 at 10:12 am
Without knowing the population size of that group, this tells us nothing. For sake of argument, call the US population 300 million and say women under 45 are one quarter of that – 75 million for 2004.
If in 2004, say 10,000 died of heart disease and in 2005 10,100 died of heart disease, what does that tell us? The increase would be less than a percent, and maybe not indicative of a trend at all. If 500 died in 2004 and 600 died in 2005, then I’d say this is serious and warrants further study.
People who don’t understand statistics are victims. They can be easily manipulated.