Risky Business: Is It All Relative?

Now this movie takes me back a few years. Tom Cruise’s first big movie Risky Business. His underwear dance scene is pretty famous (haven’t scene it yet? Have a gander here). 


So what does Tom Cruise in underwear have anything to do with our blog? Well it is the concept of risk that interests me today. David Streiner was a fantastic professor of mine and is the author of many great stats publications. He talks about risk here. I will endeavor to do the topic justice with his help over the next few posts.


What do we mean when we talk about risk? In lay terms a risk is generally associated with a bad event. However, a risk in statistical terms refers simply to the probability (usually statistical probability value between 0 and 1) that an event will occur, whether it be a good or a bad event. 


Now that you are clear on that, you are probably wondering what are the best ways of describing risk or – better yet – comparing estimates or risk between groups (wondering what a statistical estimate is? See my earlier post here).  




Let’s say that you have just received the latest and greatest smartphone for your birthday and you can’t wait to text everyone you know to tell them about it. This would be considered the exposure: your smartphone. The outcome would be “smartphone thumb”: a painful thumb resulting from smartphone overuse (don’t believe me? See here). We can define the risk of smartphone thumb as the number of new cases of smartphone thumb (the outcome) in a given period of time divided by the total number of people who own a smartphone (the exposure) and are at risk. This is also called the cumulative incidence or absolute risk


As you have an inquisitive mind, you are now wondering what would be the difference in levels between conditions: people with a smartphone compared to people without. Well this can be expressed as absolute differences in risk or relative changes in risk and I will have mercy and address this in more detail… next post! 


For now, decompress by listening to the Barenaked Ladies singing Pinch me (believe it or not this song has something in common with Tom Cruise from Risky Business. Get it yet?).


See you in the blogosphere,




Pascal Tyrrell

Consistent Associations May Be Causal Ones…?

Do you remember the Rain Man movie with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise? Great movie that introduced Savant Syndrome to theater audiences all over the world. The savant syndrome is a rare condition in which persons with autistic disorder or other mental disabilities have extraordinary skills that stand in stark contrast to their overall handicap. There is a very interesting documentary on Kim Peeks who was the inspiration for the movie here. Anyway, last post we talked about strength – one of Bradford Hill’s criteria for causation (see here for a refresher). Today we will talk about consistency, a good qualifier for the often obsessive and ritualistic behaviors of autistic savant persons.




An association between two entities is consistent when results are replicated in multiple studies in different settings using different methods. So if a relationship is causal, we can expect to find it consistently in different studies and among different populations.  This implies that many studies need to be done before meaningful statements can be made about any causal relationship.








A great example of this is the long debated causal relationship between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. It took hundreds, if not thousands of highly technical studies and many, many publications before a definitive conclusion could be made that cigarette smoking increases the risk of cancer and in a causal manner (see here for a statement from the CDC Surgeon General).  


So be consistent in your smoking cessation and you will consistently avoid the risk of lung cancer…


Next post we will tak about Bradford’s third criterium: specificity.




Relax listening to the very eighties styled theme music to Rain Man and…


… I’ll see you in the blogosphere.




Pascal Tyrrell