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MarilynMann wrote:
>On May 27, 8:07 pm, David Rind <d...@caregroup.harvard.edu>wrote:

>>Sorry, didn't answer the other half of this. Are you talking about the
>>study published a couple of weeks ago in BMJ? My recollection is that it
>>showed no overall effect of aspirin on cognition.

>Yes, that is the study I am talking about. The aspirin group
>performed better than the placebo group in category fluency but not in
>the other tests. In the subsets of women who were current smokers or
>who had hyperlipidemia, the aspirin group experienced significantly
>less cognitive decline than the placebo group. Intuitively, those
>results make sense if women at CVD risk are also at risk of dementia.
>It is also worth noting that the dose was only 100 mg every other
>day. Obviously, more research is needed, but those results didn't
>seem like proof of no effect to me. It is possible the result would
>have been more impressive at, say, 81 mg/day and/or starting at a
>younger age.

>Marilyn

I'd have to look more carefully at the actual study, but this seems like
the sort of issue of subgroup analysis I was mentioning.

Overall the treatment had no effect on cognition, but on one subset
measure of cognition (fluency) it was beneficial, and in a couple of
subsets of patients (smokers, hyperlipidemia) it was beneficial.

Even though the latter subset results may be biologically plausible in
some way, you need to be very suspicious that all those subset results
could be due entirely to chance. It's just the nature of what happens
when lots of statistical tests are performed on lots of subsets.

--
David Rind
d...@caregroup.harvard.edu- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -
Yes, I see your point. I certainly would not expect many doctors to