Quote:
|
Could it be that overweight children are more likely to get ear infections? Which came first?
|
let's ask a different question...
is there anything that could be both associated with obesity and also middle ear infections?
what about the effects of income/social class?
1) Do people of lowest income/social class not have the highest rates of obesity?
and
2) What's the chances they also have the highest rates of middle ear infections in childhood?
well for the first question, it's big yes - poverty is very much positively associated with obesity.
and for the second? Well...
low income/social class is always associated with poorer health outcomes for just about every class of disease you can think of. So it would not be unreasonable to expect middle ear infections to be more common too.
and on a related note...
a 60% increase in Relative Risk for an observational study (especially one that looked at multiple factors aka the data dredge) is ummm...
laughable small, and could very easily occur by chance (regardless of statistical significance).
You really need at least a doubling of risk in an observational study for it to be credible. Some authors require an RR of at least 5 times for it to be taken seriously.
