Suppose a new medical study at a research university shows that a woman's chance of developing breast cancer triples if she is overweight. You know that the American Cancer Society says that the chance of a woman developing breast cancer in her lifetime is 1 in 9 . Does being overweight now increase a woman's chance to 1 in 3 of developing breast cancer?
a. Yes; 1/9 3 = 1/3.
b. No; the baseline risk for women like the ones in this study may have been different from the American Cancer Society's lifetime risk.
c. No; unless a causal relationship is established, you should just ignore all risk statistics.
d. None of the above.
Question 2
Suppose you hear a report that says the chances of developing lung cancer increase by 10 times, just by living in the city versus the country. How do you interpret this?
a. You had better move to the country; 10 times is a huge difference.
b. You need to find out what the baseline risk is and what confounding variables were adjusted for before you can determine how serious this is for you.
c. You should just stay put; no one could possibly come up with a valid statistic that measures this.
d. You should ignore the results. Your increased risk should depend on whether or not your house contains radon gas, not on whether the house is in the city or the country.
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