When Risk Is a Red-Meat Issue

The conflaguration of relative risk and absolute risk is a major issue when looking at any study. The "Numbers Guy" at the Wall Street Journal discusses this with regard to recent studies looking at the risk of death as a function of eating red meat...

Uvealblues

When it comes to evaluating risk, there's a big risk of choosing the wrong number.
Researchers typically measure the effects of, say, a risky health behavior or a controversial new law by comparing how two groups fare. There are two common ways to make the comparison, and the numbers produced can look very different—and be interpreted quite differently by the public. Each can be appropriate, depending on the situation and audience, but listing one without the other is a recipe for confusion, many statisticians say.
Two recent news stories demonstrate how two sets of numbers can describe the same situation. A study by public-health researchers, including several from Harvard University, found that eating one additional serving of processed red meat each day is associated with an increase in the risk of death each year by 20%. But that translated into only two more deaths per 1,000 people per year among those eating the extra meat, or a rise of 0.2 percentage points.
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"Relative risk is the ideal measure for statistical analysis, for addressing scientific questions," says Don Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "But it is irrelevant for individual decision-making.