WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 (UPI) -- A recent New England Journal of Medicine study about the overweight was simply underdone. As the June 27 edition of this column mentioned, there has been some debate as to whether the moderately overweight -- those with a Body Mass Index of 25-29.9 -- are at any increased risk to their health.
The Washington Post thought the study provided conclusive proof that "being even moderately overweight ... increases a person's risk of developing heart failure, a serious condition in which the heart is unable to pump enough blood to supply the body's needs" ("Study Links Excess Weight to Risk of Heart Failure," Aug.1). In fact, it did not, but that didn't stop the researchers and the journal from pretending it did.
The study, from researchers for the Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts, found a relative risk for the overweight of 1.5:1 in women and 1.2:1 in men. On their own, these figures should not be enough to convince scientists of anything. Because any study, no matter how well designed, may fail to account for other, confounding factors and the random effects of chance, hazard ratios of less than 2:1 are not recognized as being indicative of anything.
In fact, the New England Journal of Medicine told Science magazine in 1995 that, "As a general rule of thumb, we are looking at a relative risk of 3 or more (before accepting a paper for publication)." Yet the issue is even less clear-cut, because the relative risk for men was not even statistically significant.
Moreover, even for obese men the relative risk did not exceed 2:1. It did, however, for obese women. In what seems like an effort to get around the lack of statistical significance for danger to overweight men, the researchers combined all the results into a "continuous variable." This did produce a statistically significant risk ratio for men, but at the miniscule level of a mere 5 percent increased risk. The risks for women and the overall population were similarly tiny using this method.
The study therefore proves very little, and certainly not what the Post claimed. Women may be at some risk of heart failure from being obese, and men might be, but neither sex need worry particularly about heart failure if they are merely overweight. But another question arises from this research. If being overweight is bad in itself, why is it worse for women than for men? These very results suggest that something else may be at work that the researchers have not considered.
Finally, as Steven Milloy, publisher of Junkscience.com, pointed out, the Journal attached a curious editorial to the study, written by a consultant to a large drug manufacturing concern, which advocated the use of pharmaceuticals in reducing the risk of heart failure. One might wonder why NEJM was so keen for doctors, its main audience, to be told that their overweight patients were at risk but that the drugs companies had a solution.
"Racial profiling remains the most potent issue facing African Americans today," stated Alvin Williams, president and chief executive officer of Black America's Political Action Committee, or BAMPAC, in response to a poll carried out for his organization. It found that 47 percent of African American males said they had been unfairly targeted on racial grounds by law enforcement for traffic stops and searches. Further, 60 percent of African American men and 45 percent of women said they had been or knew someone who had been profiled.
Yet the question of how important an issue it is to African Americans is slightly more nuanced than Mr. Williams suggests. Research from two criminologists at George Washington University, published in the May 2002 issue of Criminology, suggests that middle class African Americans are more concerned about the issue than lower class African Americans. They are more likely to have lower opinions of police officers because they are more likely than lower class African Americans to feel they have personally experienced racial profiling.
This could be for two reasons: first, they appear to be targeted for traffic stops more often. Second, while having high status possessions helps whites in their dealings with police officers, those same officers seem to treat blacks with valuable possessions more suspiciously. A white owning an expensive car is treated deferentially, while a black owning the same car might be suspected of being involved in the drug business. One Canadian study referenced by the researchers found that university-educated black males were five times more likely to be stopped by police than their white peers. They attributed the reason for this to their possessing expensive cars.
Middle class blacks are also more likely than lower class blacks to perceive racism in other institutions than the police such as employment, housing and the judicial system. This may be because lower class blacks are more fatalistic, or because they perceive the problem more in an economic fashion than a race one. Lower class blacks are also more surrounded by crime problems than middle class blacks and are therefore more likely to see the benefits of what the police are doing. The middle class on the other hand may see the police more as an obstacle to them personally than a benefit to society.
The issue is certainly a potent one, but in defiance of what might be expected, its potency actually increases as African Americans become more successful, not less.
The most famous, if least understood, theory in physics, the Theory of Relativity, is under threat. An Australian scientist has suggested that the speed of light may have been faster in the distant past. If this is true, Einstein's great work will be rendered as out-of-date as Newton's laws that preceded it. As his great rival, Nils Bohr, once said, "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."
(Iain Murray is director of research at STATS --- the Statistical Assessment Service, a Washington-based nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy organization dedicated to analyzing social, scientific and statistical research. This column examines the facts behind recent statistical studies that have made the news but been misinterpreted, failed to make the news for some reason or are just plain weird.)
