Picturing Risks

Here's an interesting visual depiction of various demographic characteristics, risk factors and health conditions from GE.

You can click on things like age, gender, BMI, smoking, heart disease and stroke, and see crowds of little people shuffle around into color-coded categories to show, say, the percentage of people in each age group who smoke.

It's moderately entertaining, and gives us the useful information that, statistically, if you're below normal weight you will not get any diseases. (Of the four included here.)

Also, if you're morbidly obese, you may get diabetes and hypertension, but you will not get heart disease or have a stroke.

There are also little tidbits like "A 12-13 point reduction in systolic blood pressure can reduce heart disease risk by 21%."

I should note that my sweeping statement about low-weight meaning no risk of disease is of course a lie: the site is actually based on "a random sample of 100,000 patient records" and "[t]he numbers and percentages aren't statistically significant," but are meant to present basic information about risks in a new way in order to encourage creative thinking about the issues.

Well...I guess it's still interesting, even if it doesn't support my desire for grand pronouncements.

I got this from ScienceRoll.