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Cervical Cancer Just Got Much Deadlier -- Because Scientists Fixed a Math Error (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cervical cancer is 77 percent more deadly for black women and 44 percent more deadly for white women than previously thought, researchers report today in the journal Cancer. But the lethal boosts aren't from more women actually dying than before -- they're from scientists correcting their own calculation error. In the past, their estimates didn't account for women who had undergone hysterectomies -- which almost always removes the cervix, and with it the risk of getting cervical cancer. We don't include men in our calculation because they are not at risk for cervical cancer and by the same measure, we shouldn't include women who don't have a cervix," Anne F. Rositch, the study's lead author and an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins told The New York Times. For the study, the researchers looked at national cervical cancer mortality data collected between 2000 to 2012. They also looked into national survey data on the prevalence of hysterectomies. Then, they used those figures to adjust the number of women at risk of dying of cervical cancer. The researchers found that black women have a mortality rate of 10.1 per 100,000. For white women, the rate is 4.7 per 100,000. Past estimates had those rates at 5.7 and 3.2, respectively. The new death rate for black women in the US is on par with that of developing countries. Though the new study wasn't designed to address racial disparities, experts speculate that the large difference reflects unequal access to preventative medicine and quality healthcare.
Seems like an obvious error from a statistical analysis standpoint. Makes me wonder how much critical medical research has obvious errors like this.
See? I always told everyone math give you cancer! Now I finally have a proof.
It seems to me both are true and useful. I would even go so far as to say the original number is more useful.
1 in X women die from cervical cancer. (old number)
Of women who did not have a hysterectomy (prior to cancer), 1 in Y die from cervical cancer. (new number)
Both are true. How might mortality rates be used? One important use is comparisons for policy making decisions:
10 in X women die from heart disease, 1 in X die from cervical cancer. Therefore, we should invest more prevention efforts toward heart disease.
Or:
X% of women die from alcoholism, Y% from cervical cancer. Therefore, we should spend the most money researching cures for ______ ?
For these policy, questions, we want to know how many people are affected. Period. It's not a useful comparison to say "of people who drink, X die from alcoholism, while of people who have a uterus, Y die from cervical cancer". Those numbers don't give us any useful comparison with which to make decisions. The useful numbers for decision making are "how many people could be helped by addressing this issue?"
Cervical cancer didn't become deadlier, we've just become slightly better informed.
Ask your doctor about getting an HPV vaccination.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The racial disparity they're talking about in this case is that white women are more likely to get a hysterectomy after they get cervical cancer than black women are. They aren't talking about the overall higher death rate among black women, which could be affected by vitamin D.
Cancer might not be caused by lack of quality healthcare, but dying of cancer certainly can be. i.e. People who have access to quality cancer treatments are more likely to survive than people who don't.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Article is paywalled so I can't read their actual data. If R is the rate at which women die of cervical cancer, n is the number of women who die of cervical cancer, N is the population of women, and h is the fraction who have had hysterectomies.
R_initial = n / N
R_adjusted = n / (N - h*N) = (n / N) * (1 / (1-h))
R_adjusted / R_initial = 1 / (1- h)
(1-h) = 1 / (R_adjusted / R_initial)
h = 1 - 1/(R_adjusted / R_initial)
For black women, R_adjusted / R_initial = 1.77, so
h = 1 - 1/1.77 = 0.435
43.5% of black women have had hysterectomies.
For white women, R_adjusted / R_initial = 1.44, so
h = 1 - 1/1.44 = 0.306
30.6% of white women have had hysterectomies.
According to this site over 1/3 of women over age 60 have had hysterectomies. Which seems to agree with the above calculated rates. I had no idea hysterectomies were that prevalent.
This new number was created by explicitly removing women that do have quality healthcare by removing women from the study that had hysterectomies, a form of quality healthcare when cervical cancer is involved. What is left are women that do not have quality healthcare.
You do realize that a woman NOT having a hysterectomy does NOT mean they don't have access to quality healthcare, right?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Make no mistake, HPV vaccinations are good for men to get too - even though they don't have cervices because the virus has been linked to other cancers - including throat and tongue cancer. Even if you argue those links are not really definitive yet, getting the vaccine prevents the risk of becoming a carrier and acting like a cervical cancer typhoid-Mary (now watch as the MRA's start demanding men not get the HPV vaccine because men shouldn't be expected to NOT kill women they have sex with).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It's a classification error.