corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism International News

July 2001

Hormone Replacement Therapy: Gallbladder disease

Results:

36% of 1140 respondents indicated that the impact of HRT on increasing or decreasing the risk of gallbladder disease was very uncertain.


63% of 1139 respondents indicated that regarding gallbladder disease, HRT was likely to be neutral.


There was a significant negative correlation between respondent’s level of certainty and their estimate of benefit.  (Spearman’s rho = -0.51 p

<0.0001) Those who felt more certain were more likely to believe that HRT had a harmful effect on gallbladder disease rates.

Our comment:

The impact of HRT on gallbladder disease is very uncertain but may be very harmful.

Explanation:

In the HERS trial the rate of gallbladder disease was 4.5% in the placebo group vs 6.1% in the HRT group. (p = 0.05 ie borderline statistical significance).  Results from ERA are consistent with that but the numbers were too small to have the power to show statistical significance if it exists.  The possibility that the difference seen in the HERS trial was only due to chance should be taken seriously because the significance is borderline and so it needs to be verified in other trials.  Also if trials measure many secondary endpoints then 5% of the endpoints will have differences of borderline significance (around p=0.50) just by chance alone.

Gallbladder disease is usually not fatal but is relatively common and can be severe.

Next: Options recommended for Ann

 

 

HS Int News index

 

Comments

Our members can see and make comments on this page.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others. The contents of this page are the author's views and do not necessarily reflect the position of Healthy Skepticism or other members of Healthy Skepticism.

  • E-mail
  • LinkedIn
  • Del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • FriendFeed
  • Google Bookmarks
  • MySpace
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909