31–40 of 40 posts
It's been a while since statistics 101, and I'm curious - in practice, how do you control for these variables? Do you try for a large sample size and only compare like with like? Or do you try to estimate the impact of the confounding variables and adjust the numbers accordingly?
Doesnt this exclude heavy drinkers who died before the age of 55-65? This skews the results towards individuals whose bodies are presumably quite resilient against alcohol related health complications and managed to keep the person alive long enough to be included in this study. The title should read something more akin to "Late life heavy drinkers outlive late life nondrinkers"
Analogy: suppose we have a study about the effect of using or not using sunscreen on a Caucasian population. It wouldn't be fair to say that the results are skewed just because they didn't include non-Caucasians.
>The title should read something more akin to "Late life heavy drinkers outlive late life nondrinkers"
Indeed, the title of the paper is "Late-life alcohol consumption and 20-Year mortality".
I understand it's normal to be skeptical of whether the results apply to younger people but, as someone else mentioned, I doubt that so many alcoholics die before 55. There's probably also some practical difficulty of doing an analog study for a younger range.
What the study actually finds is that heavy drinkers who live to age 55 live longer than nondrinkers who live to age 55. This might be because heavy drinking confers some health benefit, or some behavioral benefit (couch surfing vs outdoor activity). But to me, the more likely explanation is that heavy drinking selects for people who are genetically or otherwise predisposed to live longer (by killing the rest before…
Imagine a headline that read "Smoking correlates with increased life expectancy among centenarians."
Interesting idea. Me, I'm so glad to be free of the headaches of maintaining a smoking habit I can't see ever going back, even if any health risk was irrelevant.
Hmm, seems to me that all have precisely the same likelihood of dying.
Sorry to be snarky, but this is just awfully poor editing. Reading pop science reporting is often just painful.
The variance on this thing is huge. To tie their drinking habits to their mortality, negating all other factors, on this sample size, is ridiculous.
This is so skewed. 1800 participants, all with different health backgrounds, then divided into 3 groups of heavy, moderate and never. That's not really a sample size to get any definite conclusion from. These results might be a reason to do a more trough research at the most. The variance on this thing is huge. To tie their drinking habits to their mortality, negating all other factors, on this sample size, is ridicu…
Doesnt this exclude heavy drinkers who died before the age of 55-65? This skews the results towards individuals whose bodies are presumably quite resilient against alcohol related health complications and managed to keep the person alive long enough to be included in this study. The title should read something more akin to "Late life heavy drinkers outlive late life nondrinkers"
The study is about a population aged between 55 and 65 and what happens to them in the following 20 years according to their drinking patterns. So it's not fair to say that the results are skewed. It only excludes 40-year-old drunks in a trivial way: the study is not about them. Analogy: suppose we have a study about the effect of using or not using sunscreen on a Caucasian population. It wouldn't be fair to say that…
Also, the article cites that the nondrinkers may be more likely to be poor. This means a) less medical care to have doctors find things early, b) less stress, and c) they are not benefiting from escaping any stress they do have. Really, this article seems more like, "Stress kills, alcohol relieves stress temporarily, those who drink often have less responsibilities." So an alternative to alcohol: relaxation.
It also (as far as the article) does not go into detail about how many were from natural causes, etc. I'd be interested in whether the nondrinkers were more prone to heart attacks and this caused the discrepancy in deaths.
I can see so many holes in the research that I think it is far from conclusive on the matter.
absolute non drinkers are uptight,
and heavy drinkers are pickled and preserved.
My grandfather just died at the age of 97 and he was never without a 'snort', aka Coke and Canadian Velvet. He was quite normal up to about 95, and never had any serious ailments.