I don’t think I have ever read an advertisement for a new medication without pausing at some eye-catching statistic. “BlogCor can reduce your (Insert Lab Value) by 50%,” seems to be the garden variety statistical claim.

At age 23, I’m part of the “young invincible” (the group of healthy uninsured in their twenties), but, everywhere I look, I see a new condition that I “might be at risk for”. How healthy am I really? Should I start to worry and pursue prescriptions for these medications to better my health? The statistics sure seem to suggest so.

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kevindooley

Sure, maybe I am at risk for some health conditions. After all, I do indulge in red meat and I’m no fitness aficionado. But are the statistics in advertisements everything they claim to be? Maybe reality isn’t as jaw dropping as the advertisements. For example, take a look at TIME’s explanation of surrogate outcomes in their article “How Not to Get Misled by Health Statistics“:

A new drug or treatment may reliably lower cholesterol, say, or reduce the size of a tumor — these are surrogate outcomes — and the drug-maker would call that a success. But the ultimate goal of treatment isn’t simply to give you lab results you can boast about, it’s to make you feel better and live longer; those are the patient outcomes. Sometimes though, good surrogate outcomes don’t lead to good patient outcomes. Hormone replacement therapy, for example, raises good cholesterol, which helps reduce the risk heart disease. But it also makes the blood more likely to clot, which raises the heart disease risk. A cancer treatment that shrinks the size of a tumor is of limited value if it’s soon followed by tumor regrowth.

Yeah, it may sound nice to lower some lab value by 40%, but does it really matter if that surrogate endpoint doesn’t help you live any longer? A new drug only has to prove that it is at least better than nothing (placebo) to be FDA approved. The “better than nothing” studies don’t have to prove anything beyond these surrogate endpoints.

Relative risk, another distorted statistic common in drug advertisements, is often used to justify these surrogate endpoints. Example: “People with elevated (Insert Lab Value) are 2.3 times as likely to develop cardiovascular disease [over a 10 year period].” What if only 1 in 500 people with this uncontrolled lab value developed cardiovascular disease? To prevent one case of cardiovascular disease, all 500 people need to be treated with BlogCor for 10 years. And what if the treatment cost was $50 per month per person? That’s $3,000,000 to prevent one case of cardiovascular disease (which still might happen at year 11, 12, 13, etc, because the study only had a 10 year duration).

Advertising is used to increase the marketability and demand for a product as much as possible. Drug ads are no different. By selecting the most appealing, and potentially distorted, statistical information available, marketing teams can greatly expand the demand for a product regardless of it’s actual value to the consumer. Think deeply about the statistical claims in advertisements — like shadow puppets, they try to make things look more impressive than they really are.