Study is here:https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/aje/kwz118/5492130?redirectedFrom=fulltext …
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The press release is here, and unsurprisingly I am not a fanhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190710121607.htm …
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The study is pretty simple - the researchers took a very large database of children (1.3 million) and identified every cancer diagnosis in that group 1.3 million children, about 2,000 cases of cancer (childhood cancers are rare)
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They then compared the kids based on the characteristics of their mothers, in particular BMI, to see if that affected their risk of cancerpic.twitter.com/tiQQ5Wn9qz
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They found that there was a very weak relationship between maternal BMI and the risk of childhood cancer (p=0.01), although this risk didn't become statistically significant until mothers were above 40Kg/m^2 BMI
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They also found, in a piece of mind-blowing absurdity, that childhood leukemia was NOT statistically significantly related to maternal BMI (p-value highlighted)pic.twitter.com/r1r8sFEd5a
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I mean, we could take a non-frequentist approach and say that based on priors as well as the CI it's reasonable to make a connection there, but even so it's an amazing thing to omit from every report of the study
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It's also worth remembering that childhood cancer is VERY RARE The overall rate in this sample was 2,329 in 1,812,131 children The crude absolute risk increase was about 0.002% THAT'S TINYpic.twitter.com/KZsiqmGE2J
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Childhood cancers are awful, and very hard to prevent, but this still represents a truly miniscule risk increase and only for a small group of women
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Also, the headlines talking about OBESITY are wrong There was NO risk increase for women over 30 Kg/m^2 - medical obesity. The risk was only seen in women >40 Kg/m^2, which is quite a bit heavier
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There was also no control in the model for most confounding (they only controlled for age and race), which leaves the door wide open for alternate explanations
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Maybe more obese women are less wealthy, and therefore their kids are exposed to more carcinogens Maybe it's a whole host of complex social factors and we just aren't sure what's going onpic.twitter.com/MscqXrIeAb
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This is the kind of study that begs for further research, because the amount you can glean from it is remarkably small
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There are already well-known risks to maternal obesity, so adding another one - especially one as small as this - isn't going to change anyone's practice
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Losing weight is almost always good for your health, particularly if your BMI is over 40 This study adds almost nothing to that statement
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(Obvious caveat - losing weight is almost always good if your BMI is elevated)
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End of conversation
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