ASPIRIN PREVENTS CANCER AND HEART DISEASE! MAYBE PROBABLY, BUT WE MAY NEVER KNOW FOR SURE. Whoopee! Cheap, mostly safe, available-everywhere-no-prescription-needed aspirin prevents cancer!
But read on for the asterisks, footnotes, and caveats, some of which are subtle.
For thorough (and, I suppose, authoritative) blogging summarizing the news about aspirin reducing cancer risks, see the Science Update Blog from Cancer Research UK. Jess Harris notes that aspirin's cancer-preventing ability is not new news, but this week's developments — a metanalysis published as 3 papers in The Lancet, which covered 51 clinical trials and 80,000 patients — are clarifying news and, to my mind, strengthen the case considerably. The studies showed that three years of daily low-dose aspirin reduces the risk of developing cancer at all, and the risk dropped for both men and women.
Moreover, aspirin appears to prevent a cancer from spreading. Which means that aspirin might, perhaps, maybe, even be a help in people who have already been diagnosed with cancer. Find more summaries from
Eryn Brown at the Los Angeles Times's Booster Shots blog and Michael Edmonds at Molecular Matters.
The risk of internal bleeding was higher in aspirin-users, as expected. That risk seems to go down with continued use; after 5 years, bleeding risk is the same for aspirin users as nonusers. Good news? Maybe not for the folks taking a daily baby aspirin for heart disease. At CardioBriefs, Larry Husten interprets the findings this way:
Aspirin was associated with an initial reduction in major vascular events, but this was offset by increases in major bleeding. With longer followup the vascular effects diminished, so that after 3 years only the reduced risk of cancer was significant.
Nancy Shute, at NPR's health blog Shots, takes a cautious view. She points out that reduced cancer risk isn't seen in these studies until three years out, three years in which risk of serious internal bleeding increases. (The time lag is a reason for thinking that aspirin may prevent a cancer from occurring in the first place.) She also notes that two other large studies, not included in this metanalysis, showed no cancer benefit from aspirin — although in both cases subjects took aspirin every other day, not daily.
At the Harvard Health Blog, doc Howard LeWine is also cautious. His point is that the analyzed studies were aimed at studying whether aspirin prevents heart disease, not cancer. The cancer analysis is a longer-term follow-up. He argues that getting definitive data on cancer prevention will require clinical trials to test that premise. Some are in the works, he notes.
But I wonder. Nobody holds a patent on aspirin. Who is going to be willing to spend the zillions required for clinical trials of aspirin v. cancer? Pharmas won't. Will governments? I suppose it can be argued that it might be worth the savings in medical costs to show definitively that a baby aspirin a day could keep the doctor away. But given all the calls on government funds, even when times are a lot better than they are now, a project of this kind strikes me as unlikely.
THESE AMERICAN LIES, DEPARTMENT OF CLIMATE CHANGE. Climate-change bloggers came down hard on Atlantic editor Megan McArdle for a post acknowledging that, in forming her opinions on climate change, she relies on well-known climate-change skeptics. Joe Romm's lengthy excoriation at Climate Progress concentrates on the fact that one of her pet experts is Patrick Michaels, the well-known, not to say infamous, former Virginia State Climatologist. Romm calls Michaels a Serial Deleter of Inconvenient Data who "makes crap up on climate for a living."
Keith Kloor's post at the Yale Climate Media Forum was more moderate in tone, but he also took McArdle to task for relying on sources who are not scientists.
I suspect the strong reaction to McArdle was at least partly because she said she outsourced her opinions to these people. That's a clumsy locution. The word outsourced is haughty and a bit naughty. Journalists do rely on sources, but they don't say what they write is outsourced. It's a word that implies something different from the convention of consulting an array of experts. It's more like ceding the responsibility for forming an opinion to outsiders — and outsiders of dubious ancestry at that.
McArdle defends her choice of outsourcing sources by contending that because they denied human-produced global warming in the past but have changed their minds, the case for climate change is stronger. If it's persuasive enough to convince the doubters, she argues, then she's convinced too.
Kloor rejects that reasoning, contending that McArdle accepts their conclusions because she shares their libertarian worldview. That may be so; we all are friendlier to ideas put forth by our buddies. But her stated reasoning doesn't seem faulty to me. If nonbelievers become believers because they have concluded that the accumulated evidence is undeniable, that is persuasive.
McArdle provokes strong reactions. Last December Tom Levenson swore off further invective against her at his blog The Inverse Square — although he swore off by firing a final volley of a couple thousand words. He seems to have honored his vow of silence since, but it was preceded by much previous vitriol. Overkill, no doubt about it. But some of it struck me as correctly placed.
THESE AMERICAN LIES: DEPARTMENT OF APPLE, SCIENCE JOURNALS, AND SCIENCE JOURNALISTS. Joe Romm also lit on the disclosure that performance performer Mike Daisey had hornswoggled not only theater audiences but the much-praised radio program This American Life, convincing a whole lot of people that the Chinese electronics manufacturer Foxconn — a supplier to iApple — treated its workers in appalling fashion.
Much of what Daisey reported was entirely invented. This American Life devoted an episode to retracting its Daisey episode.
For a couple of reasons the incident has import for those of us who write about science. You can read all about one reason at Retraction Watch, in a post by Ivan Oransky. Ivan argues that science journals should be equally quick and open with retractions:
If you want readers, listeners, and viewers to continue trusting you, when you realize you’ve made a serious error, you need to retract it swiftly, not find reasons to call it a correction, or ignore the criticisms altogether. You need to provide a clear and detailed explanation of why you’re doing so.
Daisey's behavior has been compared by some bloggers (notably St. Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth), to Peter Gleick's. Gleick is the climate scientist who obtained documents from the Heartland Institute, a backer of climate-change deniers, by pretending to be one of them. This comparison incenses Romm, who argues that the two are not at all alike: Daisey made up facts about an Apple supplier and said they were true, whereas Gleick made public Heartland's actual documents, faking only his credentials for obtaining them. (At the time Heartland charged that one of the released documents was a fake, but I have seen nothing recently to either confirm or disprove that. If it's true, then the comparison between Daisey and Gleick is more apt than Romm acknowledges.)
A second reason people who write about science should care about the This American Life fracas, Knight Science Journalism Tracker Paul Raeburn says, is because Daisey defended his fabrications by arguing that they served the truth: bad things have happened to workers at Apple's Chinese suppliers, just not the bad things he said happened. Paul's s comment:
A fact – I’m sorry to have to point out to literary theorists, memoirists, actors, directors, post-modernists, and, most importantly, writers...is a fact. This is not complicated. Facts are things that have been shown to be true.
I don't mean to put words into Paul's mouth, but this strikes me as a justification for science writers to do more evaluation and fact-checking of claims made by their sources — and to publish what they find out. It's an argument against he-said-she-said science writing, the conventional practice of being even-handed to a fault.
If a source — say a climate scientist or a climate-change denier — is ladling out crap, science writers should be labeling it "crap." I am provoked partly by disgust at US politics, that's true. But still. It's time to push back against the Big Lie.
