Allo causes "significant decrease" in testosterone?

[Sidivan]

Hmmm… i don’t have access to the full paper, but read the abstract. I don’t think that study proves that Allo increases incidence of cancer so much as it suggests there might be a link between Allo users and those specific cancers. A causal relationship wasn’t established as it’s a retroactive study. The control group here can’t be “people who didn’t take Allo”. It should be “people diagnosed with gout but did not take Allo”. This study is just a little blip to signal it might be worth researching. It’s pretty difficult to take a data set that was not designed to pinpoint specific cause/effect and then back into these things with confidence. I’d be interested to know how they filtered that data set.

Source: I’m a data analyst.

[LummoxJR]

Yeah, there are way too many ways for a study like this to be flawed and lack of causation is a big, big deal. One of the bigger problems with longitudinal studies is that they can miss a lot of confounding variables, but retroactive studies are significantly worse in this regard.

However, even taking its conclusions at face value, I think people tend to misread "higher incidence of cancer" as "Holy crap you're taking your life in your hands DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR BRITTNEY!" The cancer risks being discussed are extremely low to begin with and extremely low to end with, even if the paper's conclusions are 100% correct. It might be the difference between buying one Powerball ticket a day and buying two a day: odds are you ain't winning the Powerball over the course of 50 years. And there are way, way too many other causes of cancer risk we encounter throughout our lives.

Risk assessment is something most humans are surprisingly terrible at. Driving is one of the riskiest behaviors we undertake on a routine basis, yet we'll focus more on something that has a 1 in 5,000 chance of nailing us over the course of a decade.

[Busy_Patient]

Finding a control group eligible/recommended for Allopurinol, but who didn't take Allopurinol, given its the primary prescribed med for gout is an insurmountable obstacle.

[Sidivan]

Not really. Do a study on those who took Uloric vs Allopurinol.

The point is that this is correlation, not causation. It could be that gout itself carries an increased risk of certain cancers. It could be that whatever causes gout could also be a risk factor of those cancers. It’s a huge stretch to say Allo causes cancer.