OMG! A healthy lifestyle means you'll live a healthier life!

[agilebrit]

I'm perusing Drudge today (as one does) and see this headline:

Secret of healthy aging discovered in 35-year study...

Eat well, work out and never smoke...

Well. NO SHIT.

So I click through to the article in the Guardian and find that they asked 2500 men to volunteer for this thing back in 1979...

and 25 of them actually stuck with it.

So. On the basis of a 1% participation rate, we have a headline screaming at us that a healthy lifestyle *gasp* makes you healthier! And they proceed to draw all kinds of conclusions from these 25 dudes who ate healthy, exercised, didn't smoke, and drank in moderation. Nevermind that a self-selecting "study" like this (which picked guys from a single moderately-sized village) is hardly scientific or comprehensive, or the fact that the rest of us realize that this is, you know, common friggin' sense. NO. We need a 40-year university study to tell us what we already know!

[quote] Dementia expert Professor John Gallacher of Cardiff University said: "The Caerphilly Study has made a tremendous contribution to UK Science."

...no. No, it really hasn't. Good grief. It's made a tremendous contribution to your pocketbook, no doubt (who paid for this study? The article, mysteriously, fails to mention this), but this isn't "science" in any meaningful sense of the term.

I weep for my planet when "news" and "science" like this passes muster.

Comments

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain.

I once attended the presentation of a long paper about pelvic floor exercises which began 'Our hospital in Birmingham Alabama has the largest obstetric unit in the state with (insert number in the thousands here!) births every year. We asked every woman attending for ante-natal care over a two year period to participate in this study...' and you are thinking 'Wow! This is going to be the definitive study!'.

Then she went on to explain how many agreed, how many of those actually came into the unit to have their babies rather than having them somewhere else, how many of these then attended for their post-natal check, then for a six month follow-up as part of the research, of those the number who had done their pfes, those whose addresses were still known at the end of a year, those whose addresses were still known at 3 years to complete the final questionnaire, of whom those who had had no other pregnancy during the period comprised those whose results led to the final conclusion.

There were 8 of them.

Goodness knows why our professional body paid for this woman to fly to the UK to deliver the paper. Unless it was as an example of how difficult it is to keep people enrolled in even a short longitudinal study!