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posted by chromas on Saturday August 25 2018, @04:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the this-news-is-terrible-and-I'm-gonna-need-a-drink dept.

No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms

A large new global study published in the Lancet has confirmed previous research which has shown that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. The researchers admit moderate drinking may protect against heart disease but found that the risk of cancer and other diseases outweighs these protections. A study author said its findings were the most significant to date because of the range of factors considered.

The Global Burden of Disease [open, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31310-2] [DX] study looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries, including the UK, between 1990 and 2016.

Analysing data from 15 to 95-year-olds, the researchers compared people who did not drink at all with those who had one alcoholic drink a day. They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day. For people who had two alcoholic drinks a day, 63 more developed a condition within a year and for those who consumed five drinks every day, there was an increase of 338 people, who developed a health problem.

One of the study authors, Prof Sonia Saxena, a researcher at Imperial College London and a practising GP, said: "One drink a day does represent a small increased risk, but adjust that to the UK population as a whole and it represents a far bigger number, and most people are not drinking just one drink a day."

Related: The Truth We Won't Admit: Drinking is Healthy
Study Shows 3 Drinks a Day May Cause Liver Cancer
Even Moderate Drinking Linked to a Decline in Brain Health
American Society of Clinical Oncology: Alcohol Use Increases Risk of Cancer


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @06:55PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @06:55PM (#726303)

    People over 100 years old should largely be ignored. They're statistical outliers and if you look at the range of diet and exercise practices, a lot of them are engaged in behaviors that we specifically know to chop decades off of a person's life. But, they just happened to be the one in a large number of people with similar bad health habits that survived long enough to get old. The long tail of a distribution can be incredibly long at times.

    The better questions are really where is the mean and how many standard deviations do you need to get to in order to hit that age with differing dietary and exercise practices.

    It also neglects the quality of life of these various people. My grandfather "lived" to be 93, but the quality of life those last 15 or so years was horrendously bad. I was there when he tried to wash his hands in a urinal because so much of his brain had been damaged by the strokes he had. But, even at that age, it took nearly 2 weeks with no food or water before he finally died.

    The strokes were likely due to his diet during the years he was alive and the smoking probably didn't do him any favors either.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @08:12PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @08:12PM (#726336)

    People over 100 years old should largely be ignored. They're statistical outliers

    No, the "outliers" are the interesting data. This practice of throwing them out (or "ignoring" them) is just awful. So many self-defeating practices are rampant amongst medical researchers... I am seriously scared I will die any time I interact with healthcare workers at this point. Its only the basic common sense of doctors and nurses, etc that is saving us.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @08:52PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @08:52PM (#726346)

      The outliers are not the interesting data unless you can somehow identify those individuals as being a member of a group or class that can be studied. Just by random chance you're going to have a small number of people living to extreme old age. The maximum appears to be somewhere around 120 or so, but out of the billions of people on the planet, only around 316k people are believed to be over the age of 100 out of a population of roughly 7.3bn people.

      That is a tiny percentage of the population and there's no particular reason to believe that they're anything other than just random outliers. Indeed if you read up on what these people are doing in terms of lifestyle, there's not really much there to bunch them all together.

      You assume that there's things that can be learned from those of extreme age that would help younger folks, but there isn't any basis for the assumption that there's something that we can learn from them that would make much of a difference. By the time you're talking about somebody over the age of 100, you've already seen upwards of 99.99% of their peers die earlier.

      The more valuable question is figuring out how to decrease the total number of births and then increase the percentage surviving to see age 10, 20, 30, 40 etc., as that's much more valuable than trying to hit that kind of extreme age where the people aren't even necessarily healthy.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @10:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @10:07PM (#726370)

        The outliers are not the interesting data unless you can somehow identify those individuals as being a member of a group or class that can be studied.

        Yes, exactly. This is what should be done with outliers. They should not be ignored/dropped until you understand the reason for them (they lied about their birthday or whatever).

        Just by random chance you're going to have a small number of people living to extreme old age.

        "Random chance" just means you don't know why and you approximate reality by using some sampling distribution in your model. You can in fact predict exactly which side a coin will land on if all physical/environmental parameters are known. Usually we don't have all that info though, so we call it "random" and model it with an approximation. The rest of the post is premised on the idea "random chance" is some real external thing rather than reflecting someones state of knowledge.

        Moving "random" (previously called "the god(s) did it") to "non-random" is what happens as science progresses.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:16AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:16AM (#726404)

        It's not just random chance. My great-grandmother lived to be 99. Her three sisters, 102, 105, 106. None of them had any sign of dementia.
        I don't know what the cause was, but I hope I inherited it.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday August 26 2018, @03:39AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 26 2018, @03:39AM (#726441) Journal

        The outliers are not the interesting data unless you can somehow identify those individuals as being a member of a group or class that can be studied.

        And of course, you can in this case.

        Just by random chance you're going to have a small number of people living to extreme old age.

        So why aren't people accidentally living to 300?

        You assume that there's things that can be learned from those of extreme age that would help younger folks, but there isn't any basis for the assumption that there's something that we can learn from them that would make much of a difference.

        Aside from the obvious, that they live longer than everyone else. And what we could learn from them may well allow the rest of us to live considerably longer as well.

        The more valuable question is figuring out how to decrease the total number of births and then increase the percentage surviving to see age 10, 20, 30, 40 etc., as that's much more valuable than trying to hit that kind of extreme age where the people aren't even necessarily healthy.

        Nonsense. It's mostly a solved problem. In the developed world, there's no significant die off of people until you get into the 50s and 60s. OTOH, survivors who make it to 100 have survived a lot of biological winnowing.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday August 25 2018, @11:36PM (1 child)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 25 2018, @11:36PM (#726396) Journal

      I am seriously scared I will die any time I interact with healthcare workers at this point.

      And you a very right to be scared. Statistics will show that a very significant proportion of people in the civilized world outright die in hospital or you'll find they had an encounter with a medical practitioner in the prior year of his death.

      (my point: correlation/causation, you know it already)

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @11:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @11:47PM (#726398)

        Medical errors rank third in cause of death in the US:
        https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139 [bmj.com]
        https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html [cnbc.com]

        And that is just what they consider to be "errors". At least in the research end a lot of the "standard practice" is in error. It wouldn't surprise me if eg cancer treatments and lifestyle recommendations are causing more cancer, etc. Look at how skin cancer is skyrocketing since they started telling people to wear sunscreen and keep babies out of the sun.