Which statement would make you take/not take the drug?

They are statins – you can keep them.

From my experience the quality of life not taking them at tge moment is certainly outweighing the ‘ benefits’ of taking them!

Risk of death is 1, you can’t change that.

Thanks for posting, illuminating indeed.

Agreed Bez, but it’s when you want that risk presented early on, or much later.

On a side note, my step-father is loving statins. Yes they give him pain, but it does mean that he can ignore my mother and have things like cheese and cream without having to hearing a lecture.

Well, that’s sort of the point. Is that “risk of death” the risk of death within the next n years, is it risk of that condition being the primary cause, or what is it? If the point of the piece is to be realistic about data and risk, it’s overlooking the basic statement of the risk in question, which is fundamental.

Given the introduction as it being for a heart patient with high cholesterol I assumed the mortality stats related to the reduced/increased risk of treating/not treating the cholesterol with statins?

That’s quite interesting. Sadly, some people will still take Placebos and given the chance, they would probably pay money for double strength Placebos.

Don’t underestimate the power of Marketing and the stupidity of people.

Yes, and to be fair, I’m being a little niggly for the sake of it: I assume that the risk it refers to is risk of death in the 5 years of taking the treatment in each case. But that is, of course, an assumption nonetheless.

The last option in the list alludes to the reason why I think phrases such as “risk of death” and “save a life” are quite problematic: Such vocabulary is very emotive, but it masks the fact that the quality of the life years that are preserved may be reduced in a less tangible and less measurable way. It’s quite relevant to cycling where, for instance, people tend to point to deaths or traumatic experiences and use them as justification for measures that would have other harmful effects: ie the dangerisation of something that carries a small risk of traumatic injury but a much broader health benefit. It’s this emotive nature of trauma that often makes conversations about the safety of active transport quite difficult.

A lot of people will read stats and interpret them to suit their own preconceived view anyway.

We have already made up our minds and our views are skewed by this. Anything we see / read / hear is cherry picked or adjusted to suit.

Its pretty hard to get a change of behaviour using evidence / stats / facts.

But you can at least use stats to demonstrate that someone is being a narrow-minded tool 🙂

Those who make it into the “live” column without treatment, just to be clear, all we’re saying is that they survived at all?

Cos a lot of people survive heart attacks and strokes and stuff these days.

Sometimes barely.

I think we may be overanalysing this 🙂

The point is that the statement “your risk of death is reduced by 40%” probably sounds more attractive than “your risk of death will fall by 0.03” although they convey the same statistical meaning.

It’s how politicians manage to spend so long arguing over whether things are better or worse since policy ‘Y’ came into effect or disaster ‘X’ happened.