Useful science/health reporting
As I’ve commented before, most good-quality randomised trials of vitamins in humans have disappointing results. A few don’t, and it’s nice to see these reported accurately. The Herald tells us about an Australian trial which has found nicotinamide, a version of vitamin B3, can reduce the rate of new minor skin cancers in people who already have had a lot of them. This isn’t especially dramatic, but for many older pale-skinned people in New Zealand, Australia, or South Africa it could reduce a recurrent medical annoyance.
The only real omission in the Herald story is the link to the research: there’s a conference abstract for a talk to be given at the American Society for Clinical Oncology conference later this month.
Update: yes, this sort of story is less impressive and has less public health significance than claiming WiFi causes brain cancer in children, but it does have the advantage of being true.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Thanks for linking to the conference abstract. I went looking for a source as well but only managed to find this press release: http://www.onclive.com/conference-coverage/asco-2015/Nicotinamide-Reduces-New-Skin-Cancers-in-Those-at-High-Risk
It has what looks like a citation at the bottom, but searching for that study name and looking through the latest edition of the cited journal turned up no results. Seeing that the research hasn’t been published yet, that makes more sense.
10 years ago
Here’s the NEJM paper with the final results
9 years ago