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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @07:37AM (5 children)
Sounds like the "scientific consensus" was wrong!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @08:03AM
"Scientific consensus" in this case, is bought and handsomely paid for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statin#Society_and_culture [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @08:25AM (2 children)
It's always wrong, just a little bit less wrong today than yesterday. And that's the point and what makes it better than any alternatives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @11:42AM
In this case, it would have been better to ignore the consensus than accept it. Clearly, following the consensus was not the best alternative. Are you crazy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @11:57AM
The first is correct, the second is not necessarily true. There is nothing stopping people from digging into a failed idea/concept/theory and getting a worse and worse understanding for decades. Sometimes you need to backtrack, especially if they haven't been careful about replications and making/checking precise predictions (pretty much all of biomed, psych, sociology, education research, etc are in this danger).
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday August 24 2017, @05:47PM
It looks to me like someone isn't very good at statistics and the fact that not everyone is in the middle of the bell curve. For example, my grandmother outlived five doctors who all told her if she didn't get her cholesterol down she'd die. She didn't get the cholesterol down and finally did die, at the age of 99 when she fell and broke her hip. Her brother had started smoking at age 12, quit at 82 and died at 92.
That's one of the many problems with too small a sample size, your entire study may be made from outliers so your data are garbage.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience