Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19050

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Woloshin S, Schwartz LM, Welch HG.
Risk charts: putting cancer in context.
J Natl Cancer Inst 2002 April 11; 94:(11):799-804
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/94/11/799.long

Abstract:

Whether people respond to a given health threat depends in part on how large they perceive their personal risk to be. Typical presentations of health risks (e.g., in the news, in public service announcements, and in direct-to-consumer advertisements) may do little to inform these perceptions. For example, efforts to describe various diseases to the public often take the following form: “This year, approximately 182 800 women in the United States will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, and approximately 40 800 women will die from breast cancer” (1). Similar messages can be found for most well-known diseases [and increasingly, over the Internet, for less well-known diseases, such as hemochromatosis (2)]. What is missing from these messages is context: How does the chance of dying from breast cancer—or any other single disease—compare with the chance of dying from another disease? What is an individual’s chance of dying from any cause? Without some context, it is impossible to gauge the magnitude of a disease risk.

To provide this context, we have created simple charts with age-, sex-, and smoking-specific data about the chance of dying from various common causes. In this article, we describe the method for creating these charts and make the charts publicly available.

Keywords:
Accidents/mortality Age Factors Cause of Death Female Humans Infection/mortality Male Neoplasms/diagnosis* Neoplasms/etiology Neoplasms/mortality* Probability Prognosis Risk Assessment Sex Characteristics Smoking/adverse effects Time Factors Vascular Diseases/mortality