Data can be fun. For example, you can take a large amount of data and come up with results that look good spreading a message, but don’t actually make logical sense.
Some anti- smoking activists took a look at data from a large study and concluded that there was a significantly increased risk of heart attacks among vapers, even if they didn’t smoke.
That’s a little disturbing, I must admit. But, it turns out, if you look at vapers who had heart attacks, but don’t actually look at when the heart attacks happened in relation to vaping, well you get some interesting results.
But according to Brad Rodu, a tobacco researcher at the University of Louisville, most of the e-cigarette users who reported heart attacks had them before they started vaping, which makes Glantz’s causal inference logically impossible. In a July 11 letter to the journal’s editors, Rodu noted that Glantz and his co-author, Dharma Bhatta, “failed to account for detailed information in that survey on (a) when participants were first told that they had a heart attack and (b) when participants first started using e-cigarettes.”
Anti-Vaping Researchers Claim E-Cigarettes Cause Heart Attacks Before Smokers Try Them – Reason.com
Yes, that’s right, if you ignore the fact the heart attacks happened (often years) prior to vaping, all of a sudden, this is a non-story.
I bet if you were creative enough, using this logic, you can identify a link between heart attacks and visits to the gym or donating to chairty.
