How Not To Report Health Stories: "How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer"

[muriel_volestrangler]

Surprise, surprise, this is the Daily Mail, the British king of health scares:

Social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact, a doctor claims.

Emailing people rather than meeting up with them may have wide-ranging biological effects, said psychologist Dr Aric Sigman.

Increased isolation could alter the way genes work and upset immune responses, hormone levels and the function of arteries. It could also impair mental performance.

This could increase the risk of problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia, Dr Sigman says in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology.
...
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/health/article-1149207/How-using-Facebook-raise-risk-cancer.html

An analysis of Sigman's article by a less hysterical journalist (the link he gives to the original article doesn't seem to work - here's another: http://www.iob.org/userfiles/Sigman_press.pdf )

Then it goes somewhere quite different: into "differential gene expression in lonely individuals", which is the findings of a paper (full text online) from Genome Biology of 2007: "high-lonely" individuals have lower levels of various blood chemicals than those who, um, aren't. Which is an interesting finding in itself. More social contact = reduced morbidity (likeliness to die); less social contact = the other way.

There are plenty of studies showing that real, human physical contact is good for you. Sigman points to a 1998 study that suggested that greater use of the internet "was associated with declines in communication between family members in the house, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their levels of depression and loneliness."

OK, that was 1998 though. In fact, Sigman doesn't really have anything to say about social networking systems such as Facebook and Twitter. His article ends with "presiding over a growing body of evidence, we should now explain the true meaning of the term 'social networking'. At a time of economic recession our social capital may ultimately prove to be our most valuable asset."

Er... OK. Nothing about Twitter giving you cancer then? No. There are some older studies which suggest that "women with small social networks show more than twice the death rate."

[Hello_Kitty]

1. Yet another example of sucky mainstream science reporting

No wonder people are so scientifically illiterate and wont to believe nonsense like Intelligent Design.

[MADem]

2. Just from that first quote....!!!

COULD raise....MAY have....COULD alter....COULD also impair....COULD increase....

My, what a CONDITIONAL fun-fest!!! And that's before the article is trashed for other reasons! :rofl:

I'd love to know how they measure "loneliness," myself. I know a few old geezers in their nineties who don't get out much, talk a bit on the phone, but aren't social butterflies, they don't get out much except to doctor's appointments and so forth. They live alone but they aren't "lonely."

I think the internet is wonderful for keeping in touch. If you're in Iraq, or any other remote location, and your family is in the USA, there's nothing like that awful internet and a web cam to keep your connection strong and make you feel the opposite of lonely.

I guess we have to ask ourselves: Why do these assholes feel the need to make shit up? Are they THAT desperate to sell papers?

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Yes, they are that desperate

Ben Goldacre, the excellent Guardian Bad Science columnist/blogger/author, has a theory that the Daily Mail is on a grand dualist project to divide up absolutely everything in the world into things that either cure cancer, or cause it. Because that always gives them a headline.

[T_i_B]

5. Plus, they seem to have a thing about social networking sites

They love to portray Facebook as being full of identity theives and peadophiles, which may convince 80 year old biddies with no internet access but not the rest of us who actually realize that you can set your own privacy settings on there to keep people who are not your friends from looking at your profile.

Personally, I suspect that they are just fed up with staff spending all their time on MySpace and Facebook and they don't want to point anyone towards anti-Daily Mail Facebook groups.

[customerserviceguy]

3. Correlation and causation

are two different things. Even if you could statistically prove that more people died of a particular disease when they engaged in looking things up on the Internet, you're just measuring the folks who cannot afford to see a doctor, and try to manage illness on their own.