What does it mean if the experimental group in a study had an increased overall risk of brain cancer by 98%?

915 views

Let’s say there were 10,000 people in the study. If 100 people in the control got cancer, does that mean there were 98 more people that got cancer in the experimental group?

If anyone is interested in context, the study I’m referencing is linked [here.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4602739/#!po=1.28205)

I want to make sure I’m interpreting these results correctly because this seems very high, thank you!

In: Biology

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Generally no. Say the incidence of brain cancer in the control group is 0.1%. A 98% increase means that the likelihood of brain cancer in the experimental group increased by 98% which would make it 0.198%

So if you had 10000 people in the control group and 10000 people in the experimental group, you would expect 10 people to develop brain cancer in the control group and 19.8 people to get brain cancer in the experimental group.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes, a 98% increase means almost twice as many subjects developed cancer. Depending on what the risk was to begin with though, twice as many can be one extra person on average or a hundred.

Anonymous 0 Comments

One weird trick that professors hate: read the methods and results. This is where the answer to your question lies. Read about relative risk vs. absolute risk. The difference between these terms is where 90% of flashy popsci headlines come from.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Generally, it means that your risk has increased from almost nothing to still almost nothing.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Holy crap that was dense. I don’t think I’ve ever read a medical study before.

So, what I got out of that is that there are multiple types of benzodiazepines. Some of them have shown increased association with unique, specific cancers from a Taiwanese sample, according to this study.

Then, there’s a market of “benzos” being prescribed, which each leverage different benzodiazepines permutations. Those are created by competing pharmaceutical companies and advertised on TV, such as Xanax and other benzodiazepines.

I have a few questions:
1. Do pharmacists and/or pharmacologists participate in monitoring which are not deemed safe anymore? Whose job is it to tell us what to stay away from?
2. Do studies like these (perhaps with a more definitive case showing harm) spawn off those late-night class action lawsuit, you-may-be-entitled-to-money commercials?
3. Why isn’t there a better estimation of long term affects before these pharmaceuticals reach production?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Pretty much, if 100 people in the control group displayed the effect, 198 people in the test group did.

Note it the 98% alone is meaningless without knowing the absolute risk. Going from 10% to 19.8% is huge, going from 1 in a billion to 1.98 in a billion is not.