by Kristen Philipkoski, with Randy Dotinga and Scott Carney
Topic: AAAS Meeting
Attention all Libras: Walk carefully. You seem to have a higher risk of fracturing your pelvis than people born under other astrological signs.
Pisces? Heart failure is more likely to hit you than other people. And stay clear of Virgos when they've got a bun in the oven -- they have a higher risk of vomiting during pregnancy.
All right, calm down. This isn't a real scientific study. Or at least, it isn't a serious one. OK, it is serious, but you're not supposed to think that being a Leo or whatever will actually affect your health.
To show how connections can appear in research when they don't actually exist, researchers in Canada found that people born under each of 12 astrological signs were more likely to develop certain diseases. (This all came from an analysis of hospital records of 10 million Ontario residents.)
I wasn't able to attend the session on this earlier today at the annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science here in San Francisco, but here are some details from a press release:
“Replace astrological signs with another characteristic such as gender or age, and immediately your mind starts to form explanations for the observed associations,” says [a researcher]. “Then we leap to conclusions, constructing reasons for why we saw the results we did. We did this study to prove a larger point – the more we look for patterns, the more likely we are to find them, particularly when we don’t begin with a particular question.”...
What he found was that even though each astrological sign had its own unique disorders, his initial results were not reproduced when they were explicitly tested in a second population.
“Scientists take pains to make sure their clinical studies are conducted accurately,” [he says], “but sometimes erroneous conclusions will be obtained solely due to chance.” Statistical chance means that 5 per cent of the time, scientists will incorrectly conclude that an association exists, when in reality no such association exists in the population that the scientists are studying.
One way to reduce the chances of drawing a wrong conclusion is to try and reproduce unexpected results in further studies.
“There is a danger in basing scientific decisions on the results of one study, particularly if the results were unanticipated or the association was one that we did not initially decide to examine,” says Austin. “But when several studies all arrive at similar conclusions, we reduce the risk of arriving at an incorrect outcome.”
Charting our health [press release]
reposted from: Wired blogs
my highlights / emphasis / comments
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