Study author Alewjin Ott, of the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, in The Netherlands, said chronic tobacco use causes atherosclerosis and hypertension and that this, and other effects of smoking, increases the risk of stroke and small areas of tissue damage in the brain....These studies
statistically linking smoking with just about any disease that exists, along with any other disfunction and evil in human society, are dime a dozen these days, as every Dr. Ott and the like in the world is scrambling to get their hands into the loot swindled away from the smokers. In fact, my first
first post in this thread on Alzheimer's points to my critique of couple similar "studies" showing that smoking increases the "risk" of dementias, including Alzheimer's.
To see what is wrong with this "study", and thousands similar ones churned by the antismoking junk science industry, you only need to realize that using
exactly the same "scientific" method you can "prove", for example, that use of
breathing ventilators dramatically increases the "risk" of death.
To "prove" that "theory", you simply restrict your study to a
single parameter, the use of ventilator. Hence you will have the test group, the users of ventilators, plus the control group consisting of non-users of ventilators and to appear even more thorough and "scientific", add a third group, the former users. Then, to make it appear even more like a real science, you use "prospective" type of study (which is a stronger kind than retrospective, where family is interviewed to recall the use of ventilator by the deceased family members) and, this being a "serious science" in need of lots of money, you follow up these 3 groups for twenty years (just to get you to retirement comfortably), counting how many deaths and other unfavorable events of interest occur in each group.
What will you find? That ventilator users, in any age group will have much higher mortality (and just about any other unfavorable health event) than non-users, while the "former users" will fall in between. Say, you find that ten times more "users" died within 20 years of the study than the age matched non-users, or three times more than "former users" .
Then you can trumpet proudly to the mass media (and to the very pleased study sponsors, who may wish to sell 'ventilator cessation devices' or 'pills') that the
"ventilator use" increases the "risk" of death within next twenty years tenfold and that "quitting" the ventilator use reduces the "risk" of death tree times. Duh.
That is precisely kind of "science" that Dr. Ott and thousands other talentless, opportunistic hacks churn out every year for the antismoking con men.
The key problem with that kind of "science" should be obvious: If parameter (A) (e.g. smoking) is statistically associated with some disease (B), this could be due to:
1. (A) is causing (B), or
2. (A) is protective/relief against an (early) symptoms of (B), or
3. (A) is outright protective/therapeutic for (B), or
4. some parameter (C) increases odds of (A) and (B).
Consider, for example C="exposure to heavy metal vapors or dusts", such as mercury or lead, which will make A="smoking" more likely (due to doubling of glutathione production in smokers, thus doubling of the detoxing rate and the resulting relief from metal toxicity), while this same exposure will simultaneously increase the ods of B=Alzheimer's (or Parkinson's or other dementias and neurological & immune system diseases). Hence, any
single paramater (A=smoking) study will find A and B to be positively associated and can declare that parameter A is a "risk factor" for disease B. Duh, again. And that's all that Dr Ott "discovered".
In normal science (unlike the con job of antismoking "science"), when people encounter a statistical relation between (A) and (B), that is taken as mere
hint indicating that one of possibilities 1-4 listed may be behind. The normal science then proceeds immediately (within a year or two, or much quicker in public health emergencies) with harder scientific methods, such as
animal experiments or
randomized intervention trials, which can discriminate between hypotheses 1,2,3 and 4. With antismoking "science", as even your citation illustrates, we are still in the "hint" phase, still talking statistical associations, half a century after these hints turned up.
As to why the normal scientific progression from the "hint phase" toward hard science didn't occur in antismoking "science" decades ago and why are we still tossing staistical associations around -- it did occur, but it went the "wrong" way every time, showing that it was hypotheses (2), (3) and (4) that were behind the association, not the hypothesis (1), which is what the antismoking "reaserch" sponsors wanted to hear. They simply stopped probing behind the "hint" and are still churning the single (or few tweakable) parameter statistical studies by the truckloads, half a century later. With the public education focused on groundless selfesteem and equalities of all kinds, not much sophistication is needed from these con men to dupe the scientifically and mathematically uneducated flocks.
In our ventilator example, going from the "hint" phase to the "hard science" phase, might be a
randomized intervention trial, which would mean to take, say, 2000 ventilator users,
randomly pick 1000 of them as "quit" group and take them off the ventilator (instead of looking at
self-selected sample of "former users", which is healthwise entirely different sample than our "quit" group, the self-selected "former users" are patients who got well enough to breathe on their own and don't need ventilator any more). Then you watch these two groups, the 1000 "current users" and 1000 "former users" -- will you see now that "quitting" ventilator use reduces the risk of death threefold? Of course not -- most of the "quit" group would die, squirming in agony (yeah, poor addicts, you see how evil and addicitve those breathing tubes are), shortly after you rip their breathing tubes out.
As pointed out in the
previous posts, this is what happens, albeit not as dramatically, when you take a
random subset of smokers into a "quit" group -- they first squirm in agony for a while (poor addicts, you see how evil and addictive that nicotine is), then they end up with more cancers, including 20% more of lung cancers, 40% more colon cancer,... more heart attacks, more depression, anxiety, weight gain, suicides, accidents,... and have altogether greater mortality than the group left alone to smoke as they wished.
Forcing and pressuring people to quit smoking, through economic extortion, social pressures and "denormalization", as it has become fashonable these days, is no different than going into hospitals and ripping the breathing tubes out of the noses and mouths of patients, based on the "scientific" discovery that use of breathing tubes greatly
increases the risk of death, stroke, klidney failure,... It is a pure evil, ignorant or otherwise.
As to smoking & Alzheimer's, the real relation, which is that smoking is both protective and therapeutic against Alzheimer's, is well known for decades, not just at the
statistical level (in
multiparameter studies, where subjects compared are matched on all known risk factors, and only smoking is varied), but at the
hard science level -- several
biochemical mechanisms behind these protective & therapeutic effects are known:
a) One is glutathione upregulation by tobacco smoke, in cases of heavy metal accelerated Alzheimer's (especially frequent among Apo E4 allele carriers, which is a low mercury detox variant of Apo E gene, and this dementia has early onset, 40s & 50s).
b) Another one is stimulation and increase in the number of nicotinic receptors and upregulation of acetylcholone in the brain by tobacco smoke (in part by nicotine), both of which are depleted in Alzheimer's patients, is another mainly therapeutic mechanism (they have even used nicotine patches on Alzheimer's, albeit they don't work nearly as well as real tobacco smoke).
c) The third family of mechanisms is stimulation of vascularization & blood supplies to the brain, such as growth and branching of capillaries, by tobacco smoke (mostly by nicotine, but also by carbon monoxide and nitric oxides, which at the low levels delivered by tobacco smoke act as signals to the biochemical networks to increase the blood flow & oxygen supplies).
To avoid being duped by the pseudo-scientific opportunists, such as Dr. Ott and similar conmen, check a very readable online book I mentioned earlier:
Science Without Sense: The Risky Business of Public Health Researchby Steven J. Milloy.which explains it all very plainly and illustrates via numerous examples from ongoing "scientific" scams, how exactly they do it and how to read that kind of "risk factor" pseudo-scientific voodoo without being taken in by the conmen.
