More useless unproven drivel!

Sample size 36 🙂

I’m happy to extrapolate from that group to the full population. It’ll be reet.

And the researchers don’t know how the two strenuous joggers died – whether they had succumbed to an illness such as cardiovascular disease or whether they had been involved in some sort of accident. They could have been knocked down by a bus.

Surely your changes of being knocked down by a bus increase the longer the jog ?

A short jog to a coach is probably safer.

The article was quite neatly debunked at the time. I’ll see if I can find the links…

Yeah yeah if you say so.

Trouble is people read the article and aren’t interestesd in the debunking…

Exercices is badd….sitting on ass goood.

Surprised my old team at the Beeb fell for that one back in February. I regularly used to spike crap like that.

Interesting that the journal is blaming the media. I’d guess that if I had the original press release from the journal or the university in my hands, it would highlight that particular finding, given that pretty much the entire media ran with it.

A lot of health media are generalists, and sadly not skilled at looking much further than the press release. This is far from ideal, but academic institutions and publications know this, and share the responsibility for this kind of story when they pick the ‘sexy’ angle when trying to publicise a pretty run-of-the-mill study.

The main finding of the study is that moderate exercise helps you live longer. Dog bites man. The tenuous secondary ‘finding’ was that strenuous exercise may unexpectedly offer no overall benefit. Man bites dog – so much more attractive to newsdesks.

Here’s the conclusion from the abstract. When they stick a misleading angle into the final summing up sentence, they can’t complain too bitterly when journalists fall for it.

The findings suggest a U-shaped association between all-cause mortality and dose of jogging as calibrated by pace, quantity, and frequency of jogging. Light and moderate joggers have lower mortality than sedentary nonjoggers, whereas strenuous joggers have a mortality rate not statistically different from that of the sedentary group.

The worrying thing is that it highlights how much belief drives research reporting rather than results. The author believes that ‘strenuous jogging’ is bad for you and delivered headlines to give that impression, even though at some level he knew this belief wasn’t reflected in his data.

The worrying thing is that it highlights how much belief drives research reporting rather than results.

Cynically, I see it more that there is a pressure to deliver an attractive news angle to promote the journal or your university, perhaps to increase the profile of your team and secure funding. This sometimes overrides the author’s better judgement.

Here you go, a couple of articles from February:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryhusten/2015/02/03/no-too-much-jogging-probably-wont-kill-you/
http://www.runnersworld.com/health/the-supposed-dangers-of-running-too-much

Cynically, I see it more that there is a pressure to deliver an attractive news angle to promote the journal or your university, perhaps to increase the profile of your team and secure funding. This sometimes overrides the author’s better judgement.

That, or his wife ran off with a jogger.

Who runs so that they can live longer anyway?

i ran yesterday, i didnt die.
sample size = 1
% died running = 0

incidentally i ran with a dog and i resisted the urge to bite him.

mrblobby – Member

Who runs so that they can live longer anyway?

Rincewind

This was my favourite bit of the original Runners World article.

“If we ignore the health benefits of running, does running have any health benefits?”

They adjusted the results between runners and non-runners for BMI, cholesterol, blood pressure etc. Er…

Rincewind

I had to google that!

Cynically, I see it more that there is a pressure to deliver an attractive news angle to promote the journal or your university, perhaps to increase the profile of your team and secure funding.

Often it’s pressure from University management to produce research that has the greatest “impact” on society. Pretty much the only way to get promoted/stay in the job in some cases.

It’s a sad state of affairs that slapdash research with a sexy angle plastered on is more highly ‘valued’ than careful, well-thought out studies that don’t have a sales pitch attached.

Pretty sure this is the report that R4\more of less pulled apart earlier this year. Then more recently, last fortnight or so, they actually managed an interview with one of the authors, who admitted it was a poor conclusion that had been drawn.

It’s a sad state of affairs that slapdash research with a sexy angle plastered on is more highly ‘valued’ than careful, well-thought out studies that don’t have a sales pitch attached.

It is. And its a vicious circle because health news reporters are finding it increasingly difficult to pick out the genuinely interesting and novel research items because of the vast amount of noise generated by these fluff pieces, so more of them get published, reinforcing the impression that this is the only way to get coverage.

Even if you know it’s rubbish, if it is running heavily elsewhere, there is pressure to cover it in some form or another.

The time I used to spend looking into some nonsense or fighting off senior editors who were keen on it could have been spent reading good stuff in journals which hadn’t been heavily promoted by press officers.

It’s a sad state of affairs that slapdash research with a sexy angle plastered on is more highly ‘valued’ than careful, well-thought out studies that don’t have a sales pitch attached.

Indeed. Or that negative results are not considered worth reporting. A work colleague suggested we should set up a journal of fail. Tried something? didn’t work?, publish it in fail.

There was another stating the bleeding obvious study done a few years ago, Y hours exercise a week makes you live X years longer kind of thing, where the ammount of time exercising was actualy less over an adult life than the years gained.

I now quote it to my missus when I’m off for a bike ride or sailing as “God[i]Science[/i] doesn’t deduct fom man’s alloted time that spent riding a bike” (or whatever the quote is supossed to be).

Surely the point everyone is missing is who the coach is you’re lying on?

That sort of bullshit hype gives scientists a bad name – and the authors are directly responsible, however much they try to pass the buck now.

Problem is, they have absolutely no negative come-back over it, there is no incentive to present their research honestly and large incentives to over-hype it.