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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday August 24 2017, @06:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the everything-eventually-kills-you dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

It has been accepted wisdom for many years that the more good cholesterol people have in their blood, the better. But the good cholesterol, also known as HDL, might not be as good as we think.

In any case, the results of a new study from the University of Copenhagen seriously contradict the assumption that high levels of HDL in the blood are only a good thing. The researchers have shown that people with extremely high levels of good cholesterol have a higher mortality rate than people with normal levels. For men with extremely high levels, the mortality rate was 106 per cent higher than for the normal group. For women with extremely high levels, the mortality rate was 68 per cent higher.

"These results radically change the way we understand 'good' cholesterol. Doctors like myself have been used to congratulating patients who had a very high level of HDL in their blood. But we should no longer do so, as this study shows a dramatically higher mortality rate," says Børge Nordestgaard, Professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine and one of the authors of the study.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @07:46AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @07:46AM (#558365)

    Even earlier than that:

    "We are quite in danger of sending highly trained and highly intelligent young men out into the world with tables of erroneous numbers under their arms, and with a dense fog in the place where their brains ought to be. In this century, of course, they will be working on guided missiles and advising the medical profession on the control of disease, and there is no limit to the extent to which they could impede every sort of national effort"
    -Fisher, R N (1958). "The Nature of Probability". Centennial Review. 2: 261–274.

    Once people admit that this is the greatest threat to science (not bible thumpers, the pope, or any of the usual boogeymen), we may be able to fix it. From what I see we are still far away from hitting bottom though.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:45PM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:45PM (#558422) Journal

    Once people admit that this is the greatest threat to science (not bible thumpers, the pope, or any of the usual boogeymen), we may be able to fix it. From what I see we are still far away from hitting bottom though.

    I disagree. NHST abuse is merely a symptom. The real problem is that there is a disconnect between research and the consequences of that research. Too often, the point of research is to acquire funding or status rather than to come up with accurate results that can improve our knowledge of the world or better our existence. In that light, NHST abuse is easier to do than real research.

    And this is an insidious problem. After all, one of the more valued forms of research is so-called "blue sky" research which is devoted to areas of knowledge which supposedly don't have immediate application. It's very easy to warp that to become research that never has application, but which spends funding just as well.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @02:42PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @02:42PM (#558449)

      Well if people think that *eventually* research should lead to repeatable procedures and predictions about the future, it would be a big improvement over today. Right now people think if p [less than] 0.05 there is 95% chance the explanation is correct.

      Get rid of all that and instead go with " 9/10 labs were able to get the same result", and "the theory predicted this would happen on this date and it was only a few days off", etc and we will reap simply massive benefits. All this is, is going back to science before the NHST scam took root.