And now for a (statistical) look at disease risk as it pertains to diet, height and media coverage

Ah, the perils of parsing medical studies. ... Stats.org, a statistical reality check offered by George Mason University, offered up some recent “tsks” in its review of media attempts to put findings in perspective.

Most recently, Stats.org analyzed coverage of a study assessing the potential protective benefits of the Mediterranean diet on patients with heart problems. That media critique concluded: “As a whole, media accounts underestimated the impact of the Mediterranean diet on cardiovascular events, and poorly described the diet as a whole.”

Before that, it cast a skeptical eye toward coverage of a study linking height (or lack thereof) to heart disease.

That analysis took one report to task for neglecting “to distinguish between men and women, reporting their heights as an average among all people. This is a significant error because short women are at increased risk than short men. Many news accounts pointed to the importance of diet and smoking as having more influence than height. Certainly, these behaviors are in our control, while our height is not; however, by emphasizing factors within our control and not our stature, journalists missed one of the most important conclusions of the article.”

Hmph. Everybody’s a critic.

And, especially in this case, worth reading.

-- Tami Dennis