Thursday, March 10, 2016

Statistics

Saw this in a report:



The way it reads, I can't help but to interpret it (albeit erroneously) to mean that 99% of people taking aspirin for secondary prevention of CV (cardiovascular events) did experience a life-threatening GI bleed.

12 comments:

  1. How else could you interpret this from what is written? Someone did not proofread their report? On the one hand the prophylactic dose has been more efficiently reduced to 81 mg in the last decade. But, still ... I do think the number is probably higher than 1% out of certain populations that experience life-threatening gastrointestinal bleeding. (Still, just a gut feeling.)

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  2. You just know some anti-vax site is going to link to this post as "proof" that Aspirin has a 99% chance of causing serious bleeds, and how doctors are lying to people on it.

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  3. Nurse Lilly - bingo!

    (and yes, I read it the same way you did Doc G.)

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  4. I read that less than 1% of 6300 got a bleed.
    .01x6300=63 if it were 1%. they are claiming it is less than 1% so the number (63) is supposedly lower than that.
    Just my understanding of the phrasing.

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  5. But that tiny fraction survived and reproduced and, before too long, earth was overrun by a new super race of aspirin-resistant humans. Efforts to control the human population with acetaminophen and ibuprofen similarly failed.

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  6. I shall never know because I am for the rest of my life denied the pleasures of aspirin, Mobic, aleve , excedtin and especially ibuprofen for I have had the life threatening bleed of ulcerative colitis and we are told to never eat of the forbidden fruit of the NSAID tree.

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  7. And yet they kept taking it anyway. The power of peer pressure.

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  8. Protect your kids! All this information and more about the killer pills known as "aspies," "Bayer bombs," and "little white devils" can be found in the new movie, "Aspirin Madness."

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  9. "Further double-blind experiments are needed in order to determine whether the bleeding is caused by the aspirin itself, or by the razor blades that people customarily swallow alongside."

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  10. I'm with you Grumpy. Poor phrasing. Should say "less than 1% experienced a GI bleed; none were life-threatening." I can STILL hear a hardass prof in my first semester saying "a journal will bin you for that and won't tell you why." He'd similarly slash our work and also not tell us why. Not my favourite guy.

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  11. Bink, I don't believe your interpretation is correct.
    Most likely less than 1% experienced a non-life-threatening bleed and some much smaller percentage experienced a life threatening bleed. However if the study wasn't designed to evaluate that, than it didn't.

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So wadda you think?