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Messy math of mammograms + Health of poor Brits is worse than century ago

#1
C C Offline
The messy math of mammograms
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/math-mammograms/

EXCERPT: . . . Most patients who undergo mammograms perceive them to be a fairly accurate way of screening for breast cancer. Indeed, for people who have breast cancer, the test will pick this up roughly nine times out of ten. For people who don’t have the disease, the results of the test will tell you this correctly nine out of ten times. Knowing these statistics and having received a positive mammography result, even before the biopsy Dominique considered it likely that she had cancer. However, a simple mathematical argument demonstrates that the opposite is true.

[...] many doctors are unable to interpret positive mammograms. In 2007, 160 gynecologists were given the following information about the accuracy of mammograms and the prevalence of breast cancer in the population [...] The most popular answer among the gynecologists was ... that a positive result in the mammogram will be correct 81 percent of the time (around eight times out of ten). Are they right? Well, we can work out the correct answer ... Of the 9,900 women who don’t have breast cancer, 891 will be incorrectly told that they do have breast cancer. Of a total of 981 women with a positive result, only 90 of them—or roughly 9 percent—will actually have the disease. Worryingly, the gynecologists massively overestimated the true value. The correct answer was chosen by around one-fifth of respondents, a worse result than if all the doctors had just selected from the four answers at random.

[...] As it turned out, when April 1, the day of the biopsy, finally came around, the results showed that the mass in Dominique’s breast was an unconcerning benign growth—the whole troublesome affair, in retrospect, turning into the most welcome April Fool she’d ever received. Her travails, though, are typical of the majority of women who receive a positive mammography result. With repeated mammograms, as directed by most screening programs, the chances of receiving a false positive go up. Assuming false positives occur with equal probability of 10 percent (or 0.1) in each test, the correct diagnosis of a true negative occurs with a probability of 90 percent (or 0.9). After seven independent tests the probability of never having received a false positive (0.9 multiplied by itself seven times, or 0.97) drops to less than a half (approximately 0.47). In other words, it only takes seven mammograms before an individual free from breast cancer is more likely to have received a false positive than not. With mammograms suggested every year between the ages of forty-five and fifty-four and then every two years after that, women who follow this advice might expect at least one false positive in their lifetime. (MORE - details)



Health of poor Brits worse than that of those born a century ago
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-h...-born.html

RELEASE: The self-reported health of poor Brits is worse than that of people born a century ago, suggests a large nationally representative study of more than 200,000 working-age people, published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. The findings indicate that the gap in health has widened between the richest and the poorest, so storing up additional pressures on healthcare from those least able to look after their own health in older age, suggests the author.

A growing body of research shows that health outcomes in Britain are linked to socioeconomic status, and that differences in these between the richest and poorest in society have widened since the 1970s. But few studies have looked at the potential impact of income and year of birth on this gap.

The author wanted to find out if 'baby boomers' born after 1945 rated their health as better or worse than those born in the early 1920s, according to household income, in a bid to gauge future healthcare need. The author drew on responses to the General Household Survey for 1979-2011 from people living in England, Wales and Scotland, to create nationally representative 3-year 'health' snapshots of the generations born between 1920 and 1970.

He looked specifically at the differences in the prevalence of long term conditions (limiting illness) and self reported general health between the richest and the poorest 30 to 59 year- olds for this period. He found that inequalities in the prevalence of long term conditions between the richest and poorest households had doubled among women and by 1.5 times among men born in 1920-22 compared with those born in 1968-70.

For example, around one in four (26%) men born in 1920-22, living in the poorest households, said they had a limiting illness compared with around one in six (16%) in the richest households.

For men born in 1968-70, more than a third (35%) of those living in the poorest households reported a limiting illness compared with only around one in 10 (11%) of those living in the richest households.

For women born in 1920-22, around one in seven (15%) living in the poorest households reported 'not good' health compared with nearly one in 10 (8%) in the richest households. For women born in 1968-70, around one in five (19%) said their health wasn't 'good' compared with around one in 10 (9%) in the richest households.

"The results presented here show a widening in health inequalities by income in later-born British birth cohorts, 1920-70," writes the author. "They point to a greater future demand in healthcare from people in society who will be least capable of managing their health as they enter ages when [ill health] becomes more common."

Without any concerted action to address this, there will likely be further widening of the gap in early deaths between the richest and poorest in society, because of the strong links between poor self rated health and long term conditions and sickness and death, he emphasises.

"This is doubly important because of the growing size of later-born postwar baby boom cohorts up to 1972 that will mean that there is likely to be more people in poor health irrespective of relative declines in the prevalence of [long term conditions] in later born postwar cohorts," he says.
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#2
Syne Offline
So...what happened with their universal healthcare? The poor rely solely on that, while the richer can pay for good healthcare...like most Americans have.
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#3
confused2 Online
Poor health isn't just a consequence of poverty it is also a cause of it. I suspect most employers will try to avoid taking on blind,sick crazy, lazy and thieving employees whenever possible. Once employed those mentioned have the legal right to demand alterations to their workplace without reasonable limit. Time off to the point where people are being paid to do absolutely nothing and a complex and expensive system of tribunals and courts to defend the kleptomaniac from being dismissed.

Even in the last 50 years (in the UK) infant mortality has fallen dramatically [citation not given here] and sickly children grow up into sickly adults - the new poor.
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