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Kind of an interesting report.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/psychiatry/addictions/14872?xid=ob_&utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=psyc&hr=ob

Alcohol is some bad stuffs... learned at an early age that it and I do not mix. I tend to get sexually harrasive when I'm stupid drunk... *sigh*

So should I point out the irony of reading that study while enjoying a Guinness and a Jameson chaser after work? Like plenty of other things alcohol is good for you in moderation. I do tend to find that I'm more of a friendly drunk

I just get funnier and more handsome when I'm drunk.

I have seen my father, my uncle, and my grandfather.

I need no further proof of what alcohol can do to me. I stay away, despite some people trying to force it upon me.

So what you're saying is I should put the bottle down? So much for booze in my coffee

I find that statistic very hard to believe.

They calculated this using DALYs, a statistic which factors in, "lost to war, disease, malnutrition, accidents, and other causes of premature death and disability." What about natural death?

Sounds like the title of the article is intentionally misleading. It should read, "Alcohol contributes to 4% of deaths not resulting from natural causes."

Booze is one of the few things keeping me alive and relatively sane.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
I find that statistic very hard to believe.

They calculated this using DALYs, a statistic which factors in, "lost to war, disease, malnutrition, accidents, and other causes of premature death and disability." What about natural death?

Sounds like the title of the article is intentionally misleading. It should read, "Alcohol contributes to 4% of deaths not resulting from natural causes."

How do you define "natural death"? Since you obviously don't include disease in that, I'm a bit confused.

Im off most alcahol. I get friendly, giggly, blackout, phase in and out of being concious of what i am doing, vomit and then regret all and nothing. In that order.

Apparently, despite my brain being passed out, my body continues to function like i normally do when drunk (I.E. giggling and happy) except with a slight increase in the staggering.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
I find that statistic very hard to believe.

They calculated this using DALYs, a statistic which factors in, "lost to war, disease, malnutrition, accidents, and other causes of premature death and disability." What about natural death?

Sounds like the title of the article is intentionally misleading. It should read, "Alcohol contributes to 4% of deaths not resulting from natural causes."

How do you define "natural death"? Since you obviously don't include disease in that, I'm a bit confused.

This is exactly the problem.

The authors of the article calculate DALYs using "premature death". What is non-premature death? I assume that this refers to "natural death", but how do you define this?

The study uses a poorly operationalized construct to satisfy special interests.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
I find that statistic very hard to believe.

They calculated this using DALYs, a statistic which factors in, "lost to war, disease, malnutrition, accidents, and other causes of premature death and disability." What about natural death?

Sounds like the title of the article is intentionally misleading. It should read, "Alcohol contributes to 4% of deaths not resulting from natural causes."

How do you define "natural death"? Since you obviously don't include disease in that, I'm a bit confused.

This is exactly the problem.

The authors of the article calculate DALYs using "premature death". What is non-premature death? I assume that this refers to "natural death", but how do you define this?

The study uses a poorly operationalized construct to satisfy special interests.

I would guess they take the average lifespan for the country.

Natural causes (aside from disease) would be old-age and various bodily functions simply giving up, most notably the heart. It seems this is not accounted for in DALYs. But I too would like to know the origin of the base figure DALYs are calculated from. If it's anything different from the exact same data that was used to determine how many deaths were alcohol-related, its validity is suspect.

I'd also like to know the size of the data (how many people were measured), and a full breakdown of the causes, not just alcohol. For instance, how many were accidents? How many were cancer? How many were caused by cigarettes? Violence or crime? The figure for alcohol seems a bit meaningless on its own without comparison.

What I've taken away from this is only another case of a probably worthwhile study blown out of proportion by media to further their own agendas. Why is alcohol even concentrated on? What happened to the other 96%?

 Super Ready wrote:
What I've taken away from this is only another case of a probably worthwhile study blown out of proportion by media to further their own agendas. Why is alcohol even concentrated on? What happened to the other 96%?

I think the same thing about firearm hysteria

I wonder what those "special interests" are ... informing the public that indeed too much alcohol can kill you? Seems conspiritory lol.

 Super Ready wrote:
What I've taken away from this is only another case of a probably worthwhile study blown out of proportion by media to further their own agendas. Why is alcohol even concentrated on? What happened to the other 96%?

Because OMG alcohol is more dangerous than [insert banned substance here]

 DemetriDominov wrote:
I wonder what those "special interests" are ... informing the public that indeed too much alcohol can kill you? Seems conspiritory lol.

You need to look at how organizations like this are funded.

http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh342/135-143.htm

JÜRGEN REHM, PH.D., is director of the Department of Social and Epidemiological Research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and chair and professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, and is a section head at the Institute for Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.

The cycle goes like this. Researcher publishes study on alcohol. Everyone freaks out about the dangers of alcohol. Due to pressure, the NIH and WHO fund research on alcohol. The cycle starts over again...

It's in this guy's best interests to make a mountain out of a molehill. Without people freaking out about the dangers of alcohol use, the Center of Addiction and Mental Health at University of Toronto will go broke.

Ok... so roughly 4 out of 100 "premature deaths" calculated as "Lost years" is a "Major risk factor"...

Can we get the full data, please? I am interested in what the other 96% is comprised of.
By my calculations, 4% of anything is relatively small without comparatives. Are there 90 other things that are 2% or less of this total?

Sooo. . . . I shouldn't drink everclear up my butt?

Well, only if you want some serious irritation.

So how many lives has it saved(created)?

Alcohol gave me the impetus to do every dangerous, stupid, embarrassing, illegal or otherwise regrettable thing I've done.

It cost me friendships, extremely awkward morning-after goodbyes, cumulative months of my memory, scars, stitches, and summons to appear.


OTOH, it also gave me the impetus to chat up the woman who eventually became my wife. So it's a wash.

The most interesting figure, I thought, was 45% of men and 66% of women who abstain. That works out at more than half the world population who's birthday parties I will have to avoid at any cost.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
I find that statistic very hard to believe.

They calculated this using DALYs, a statistic which factors in, "lost to war, disease, malnutrition, accidents, and other causes of premature death and disability." What about natural death?

They're two different measures. The 3.8% figure is the number of people who died of alcohol related death, divided by the number of people who died in total.

The second measure, using DALY, takes the life expectancy of the average person who dies of natural causes, and measures the amount of years lost to various health issues before then (ie if a person is normally expected to live until 75 and dies in a car accident at 25, that event took away 50 years of life)*. It then calculates all the events that caused people to die before natural causes took their lives (cancer, disease, war, famine etc) and said that alcohol represents 4.6% of that total.



*It also has a measure for reduced quality of life - ie if that car accident left you in a wheelchair that would be factored in.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Super Ready wrote:
Natural causes (aside from disease) would be old-age and various bodily functions simply giving up, most notably the heart. It seems this is not accounted for in DALYs.

Nah, that's exactly what DALY uses as the base line. It takes natural death, and then calculates the cost in life of everything that causes a person to die (or have a much reduced living standard) before that point.

What I've taken away from this is only another case of a probably worthwhile study blown out of proportion by media to further their own agendas. Why is alcohol even concentrated on? What happened to the other 96%?

We do actually spend a lot of time talking about cancer and other causes of death.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
The cycle goes like this. Researcher publishes study on alcohol. Everyone freaks out about the dangers of alcohol. Due to pressure, the NIH and WHO fund research on alcohol. The cycle starts over again...

It's in this guy's best interests to make a mountain out of a molehill.

Yeah... no. Seriously, just no. Absolutely, 100% no.

Overstating your findings and getting bitchslapped in peer review is the number one way to find your future research dollars disappear entirely. And what's more, if future funding was all that mattered, then you'd pick a lot sexier topic that alcohol.

@xole,

I'm with you on that one. There was a lot of alcoholism where I grew up and I saw more than a few divorces, deaths, and jobs lost because of it.

@Sebster,

I thought it was interesting also to. Learn that more than half the world population abstains from drinking.

 sebster wrote:


Yeah... no. Seriously, just no. Absolutely, 100% no.

Overstating your findings and getting bitchslapped in peer review is the number one way to find your future research dollars disappear entirely. And what's more, if future funding was all that mattered, then you'd pick a lot sexier topic that alcohol.

This publication in Nature shuts down that argument rather succinctly...

http://www.vub.ac.be/phd/doctoralschools/lsm/docs/435737a.pdf

It's rather ubiquitous...

http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:582178/FULLTEXT01.pdf

100% no? lol, OK. I work in academia AND the industry, and I see this constantly. But tell me how I'm wrong.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
This publication in Nature shuts down that argument rather succinctly...

http://www.vub.ac.be/phd/doctoralschools/lsm/docs/435737a.pdf

It's rather ubiquitous...

http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:582178/FULLTEXT01.pdf

It really, really doesn't prove your point. A pair of articles pointing out that some scientific studies have some level of dishonesty really, really doesn't mean we get to just start concluding that any article with a result that your gut feel says is overstated means we can conclude that the article must be dishonestly constructed in order to attract more research dollars.

That's just 'don't like their conclusion, therefore they're lying and I'm going to carry on believing whatever I want'.

100% no? lol, OK. I work in academia AND the industry, and I see this constantly. But tell me how I'm wrong.

I had to explain how DALY was used in the original article after you misread it, so that's kind of an interesting statement.

But it's great that you are in the industry, because that means you must have a subscription to the Lancet and will be able to provide us with the original article.

 sebster wrote:

It really, really doesn't prove your point. A pair of articles pointing out that some scientific studies have some level of dishonesty really, really doesn't mean we get to just start concluding that any article with a result that your gut feel says is overstated means we can conclude that the article must be dishonestly constructed in order to attract more research dollars.

The first article actually manages to commit nearly every error it is written to point out.

Also, this...

Duplication is misrepresents the work as original and a contribution to the literature

...is bs associated with Journal exclusivity, not concern with the "literature".

Alcohol may kill you but it's totally worth it.

 sebster wrote:

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
This publication in Nature shuts down that argument rather succinctly...

http://www.vub.ac.be/phd/doctoralschools/lsm/docs/435737a.pdf

It's rather ubiquitous...

http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:582178/FULLTEXT01.pdf

It really, really doesn't prove your point. A pair of articles pointing out that some scientific studies have some level of dishonesty really, really doesn't mean we get to just start concluding that any article with a result that your gut feel says is overstated means we can conclude that the article must be dishonestly constructed in order to attract more research dollars.

That's just 'don't like their conclusion, therefore they're lying and I'm going to carry on believing whatever I want'.

It actually does very well. You insinuated that scientists do not overstate their findings or commit other academic mores due to community checks in peer review. This is simply untrue, and indicates a telling naivete. The fact that something has passed through the peer review circuit indicates very little as to the quality of the research. Articles are constantly redacted. If you fancy yourself an intellectual, then try to read academic articles with a critical eye.

100% no? lol, OK. I work in academia AND the industry, and I see this constantly. But tell me how I'm wrong.

 sebster wrote:

I had to explain how DALY was used in the original article after you misread it, so that's kind of an interesting statement.

But it's great that you are in the industry, because that means you must have a subscription to the Lancet and will be able to provide us with the original article.

You keep hinging on this...the problem is that a misinterpretation doesn't exist. That value in their meta analysis gets 12 half lines in this summary and it's not the focus of the Medpage article. The bulk of it is based on DALY measures. If you know anything about meta analysis, you know that your main outcome is entirely dependent upon selection criteria (the studies that you use to calculate your effect sizes). If these criteria for studies are biased in any way, then your results are biased. You would have to review the original manuscript to see if there are issues obviously, but whenever an anti-X group publishes on the evils of X, you should probably tighten up your magnifying glass and read carefully.

The only information for which they collected novel data used DALYs. The title of the article, and the methodology with which they conducted the research, simply do not match up.

If you don't drink, eat only veg and fruit, and do plenty of exercise, you may not live to be 100 but it will seem like it.