Two scientists, Lazris and Rifkin, want to better illustrate the risks and benefits associated with preventative medicine. They do so by asking people to imagine theaters filled with 1,000 people, and describing the costs and benefits for different preventative procedures by discussing how many people in the theater will be saved or perish based on current efficacy data. One such video can be viewed here and illustrates the absolute and relative risks associated with mammography. They are attempting to demystify statistics and better explain the risks and benefits by showing an animated theater filled with 1,000 women, and showing how many women actually have their lives saved by mammograms (see screen shot below)... ...as well as the number of women who received false positives over the course of a life time... A screen shot of the video, which is trying a new way to illustrate risk. ...the video also illustrates how a "20% reduction in breast cancer deaths" ca...

This news story discusses medical advice regarding dates for recommended annual mammograms for women. Of particular interest for readers of this blog: Recommendations for regular mammograms are moving later and later in life. Because of the very high false positive rate associated with mammograms and subsequent breast tissue biopsies. However, women who have a higher probability (think genetics) are still being advised to have their mammograms earlier in life. Part of the reason that these changes are being made is because previous recommendations (start mammograms at 40) were based on data that was 30-40 years old ( efficacy studies/replication are good things!). Also, I generally love counter-intuitive research findings: I think they make a strong argument for why research and data analysis are so very important. I have blogged about this topic before. This piece by Christy Ashwanden  contains some nice graphs and charts that demonstrate that enthusiastic preventative care ...

I love counterintuitive data that challenges commonly held beliefs. And there is a lot of counterintuitive health data out there (For example, data questioning the health benefits associated with taking vitamins  or data that lead to a revolution in how we put our babies to sleep AND cut incidents of SIDS in half ). This story by Aschwanden for fivethirtyeight.com discusses efficacy data for various kinds of cancer screening. Short version of this article: Early cancer screening detects non-cancerous lumps and abnormalities in the human body, which in turn leads to additional and evasive tests and procedures in order to ensure that an individual really is cancer-free or to remove growths that are not life-threatening (but expose an individual to all the risks associated with surgery). Specific Examples: 1) Diagnosis of thyroid cancer in South Korea has increased. Because it is being tested more often. However, death due to thyroid cancer has NOT increased (see figure below)...

My favorite data is data that is both counter-intuitive and tests the efficacy of commonly held beliefs. Emily Oster's (writing for 538) presents such  data in her investigation of vitamin efficacy . The short version of this article: Data that associates vitamins with health gains are based on crap observational research. More recent and better research throws lots of shade on vitamin usage. Specific highlights that could make for good class discussion: -This article explains the flaws in observational research as well as an example of how to do good observational research well (via The Physician's Health Study , with large samples of demographically similar individuals as described in the portion of the article featuring the Vitamin E study). This point provides an example of why controlled, double-blind lab research is the king of all the research. -This is an accessible example as most of your students took their Flintstones. -The article also demonstrates The Thir...