Fella has read the article, has an argument and some stats. What more do you want from a comment? He isn't running a study.
Besides, the point is a good one. There are a lot of professions. If we glance at the underlying study [0] Figure 1 suggests that we'd probably expect to see an outlier or two in that mess just through chance, we're expecting a few p<0.01. Taxi drivers doing unusually well doesn't seem especially impressive in that light, especially since it is one of the professions that seem to die off rather young and we might expect one of those professions to do rather well on Alzheimers.
The comment insinuates that the study did not control for age. The study controlled for age.
It's not terrible to not make a good point, but it's not a good point. The not good points should not be ranked highly.
But after the study controls for age the starkness of the effect more or less disappears (eyeballing Fig 1, the 2nd graph).
It turns out that there is a profession with a lowest risk of getting Alzheimer's (duh, one had to exist) and it looks like a slight outlier (it's the lowest, we'd expect that one to look like a slight outlier). As outliers go it isn't that impressive, it looks like it is part of a fairly boring distribution. We just plotted 400 data points on the graph, the 1/400 chance weird data point is going to look a little weird. We're actually just reading a lot into the fact that the 2nd data point in ambulance drivers which isn't all that convincing.
Not to knock the study, I'm sure it is a great study. Lots of science done. They do good graphs and all that. But the study appears to be telling me that Alzheimer's is random with respect to occupation and ideally don't spend so much time on the road if you want to live to see old age.
It's getting hard to find any study posted without a kneejerk "correlation does not equal causation" take as if that's not something researchers have to control for in order to even conduct the study in the first place, let alone publish
> Fella has read the article
Then not closely enough? The study adjusts for age, which is the core of OP’s criticism.
If we read OP's comment closely, it appears to be technically correct. I can imagine someone not upvoting it because it seems to be generic, but there isn't anything wrong or low effort about with it. And I don't see where the stats came from if he hasn't read the article.
"study adjusts for age"
maybe it would help this thread to have someone explain exactly how they control for age if everyone in the range they want to study is already dead.
What is the actual process to control for age? This comes up a lot, and the only response is "oh, well, we controlled for that", well exactly how?
Seriously, I'm curious.
A distinction is that Alzheimer's is in an uncommon category of mystery diseases.
If a study found people who swim regularly are are less likely to get heart disease, that wouldn't be very surprising because know a lot about why people get heart disease. Therefore it would be valid to insist on more rigour for accepting (swimming => less heart disease) because the only use of that information is for health advice.
However even weak statistical correlations can be a valid lead for further research into Alzheimer's disease if they suggest where to look. You don't need to prove that signposts are correct in order to use them.