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Think the Answer Clear? Look Again

The New York Times Science
by Katie Hafner
August 30, 2010

The article starts with

(1) Win an Academy Award and you’re likely to live longer than had you been a runner-up.

(2) Interview for medical school on a rainy day, and your chances of being selected could fall..

Such are some of the surprising findings of Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a physician-researcher and perhaps the leading debunker of preconceived notions in the medical world

It is hard to believe that the New York Times did not know that that item 1 itself has been debuned.

The assertion that Oscar winners live longer was based on an article by Donald Redelmeier, and Sheldon Singh: "Survival in Academy Award-winning actors and actresses". Annals of Internal medicine, 15 May, 2001, Vol. 134, No. 10, 955-962.

This was convincdenlty debunked in Chance News by Peter Doyle and his student Mark Mixer. Mark illustrated the key of their solution with the remark breaking your hip increases your life Peter used a simulation to show that Oscer winners do not live longer.

Later this was also explained by an article to the Annals Of Internam Meddicine

Do Oscar Winners Live Longer than Less Successful Peers? A Reanalysis of the Evidence Marie-Pierre Sylvestre, MSc; Ella Huszti, MSc; and James A. Hanley, PhD

n an article published in Annals of Internal Medicine in 2001, Redelmeier and Singh reported that Academy Award–winning actors and actresses lived almost 4 years longer than their less successful peers. However, the statistical method used to derive this statistically significant difference gave winners an unfair advantage because it credited an Oscar winner's years of life before winning toward survival subsequent to winning. When the authors of the current article reanalyzed the data using methods that avoided this “immortal time” bias, the survival advantage was closer to 1 year and was not statistically significant.

As a condition of publication, we required the authors to make the data set available to interested researchers. Unfortunately, various complications prevented its prompt dissemination, and it has taken almost 5 years for someone to come forward with a reanalysis of the data. We are glad to publish Sylvestre and colleagues' reanalysis, partly because the article affords a chance to amend a widely publicized result, but more so because the analytic methods at issue apply to many health care research questions. L