I'm sick of being scared by scientific studies
Tall women are more likely to get cancer. As research findings go, this has to be among the most randomly vindictive scientific conclusions ever to spill out of a university research department into a screaming newspaper headline, and lord knows there have been a few.
Women who breastfeed are less likely to have heart attacks or strokes. Women who don’t breastfeed are more likely to abuse children. Women who are stressed are more likely to have children with asthma (how stressful a piece of knowledge is that?). Men who are circumcised are more likely to suffer erectile problems. Children born to men aged over 35 are more likely to have a cleft lip or palate. Men are more likely to get cancer than women. Homosexual men are more likely to get cancer than heterosexual men. Circumcised men who have sex with women who drink one glass of wine a day during pregnancy are more likely to have a child with a club foot.
OK, so I made that last one up. But the rest are all genuine pieces of research conducted by prestigious universities, published in respected journals, then fed to the health correspondents of national newspapers. Last month, tall women were marked out for death in research published in The Lancet Oncology. ‘In women, the risk of cancer rises by about 16 per cent for every 10cm (four inches) increase in height.’
My, that is precise. It must have taken some serious scientific knowhow to work that out. The question, as with all of these studies, is why? Why did someone decide to find out at what age men were more likely to produce offspring with a correctable facial deformity? Presumably it was meant to empower women to look at a male suitor and think: ‘He’s quite nice-looking, but he’s 34, which means that by the time we have kids I will run an increased risk of having a child with a cleft lip or palate, which is going to be a kerfuffle, so on balance I think I’ll tell him I’m busy tonight.’
And who on earth was sitting around on a slow Tuesday thinking, ‘I know, let’s spend a few million pounds finding out whether there’s a link between height and cancer?’ Possibly it was a bored professor daydreaming in his armchair after one too many amontillados. Or an executive at GlaxoSmithKline with his eye on the prize of a special supplement to regulate growth hormones. Or was it the leader of a fundamentalist Christian group who wanted to prove that women with long legs were the work of Satan.
In fact, the research was conceived and carried out by a team at Oxford working on a long-term health survey called the Million Women Study. This is funded by Cancer Research UK, the NHS, the Medical Research Council and the Health and Safety Executive — so, no obvious bogeyman there. Right?
Dr Jane Green, the clinical epidemiologist in charge, sounds a bit embarrassed when I ask if the project has a motive. ‘Yes, it’s a bit of a weird one,’ she says. ‘We did it because there had been research into it before and the picture was not clear. We just thought it would be interesting to know.’ She says she has been inundated with interest, including emails from women saying, basically, ‘You’re right — I’m tall and I’ve got cancer!’ It still seems a little pointless, but Dr Green says the media interest allowed the researchers to highlight factors which people can do something about.
In other words, all publicity is good publicity in the fight against the Big C. But is it? In 2008, the National Cancer Intelligence Network (NCIN), which studies NHS records, made waves by revealing that people who live in the north of England are more likely to die from cancer. On closer reading, this is due to ‘a number of factors, one of which is the higher smoking rate in the north’. So, people who smoke are more likely to die of cancer. As you were, northerners. Cancel the removal vans, just keep slapping on the nicotine patches.
While it is laudable of cancer charities to highlight risks, it is getting to the point where the shock tactics are in danger of scaring us to death. As we live longer, four in ten people will get cancer and half of those will die of it. To be philosophical, you might think, ‘Well, you’ve got to die of something.’ But you’re not meant to be philosophical. You’re meant to agonise that if you only put on more sunscreen, ate more garlic, lived in Cornwall or stopped being so tall, you might cheat death and become immortal.
The flip side of all this selfish anxiety is schadenfreude. Health-scare stories have become a spectator sport. There is something medieval about the way we round on a specific group — fat people, thin people, apple-shaped people, those who drink one glass of red wine a day, people who don’t — and relish the fact that they are going to die sooner than us because of some imagined moral turpitude. It’s as if some primitive pre-rational part of our brain reckons that the more others are at risk, the less we are. Last month, tall women were plucked from scientific obscurity to be put in the stocks as a high risk group. But you just know that next month, or some time soon, it will be short women instead.
Offer ends in:
