Comment by FrustratedMonky
3 hours ago
"study adjusts for age"
maybe it would help this thread to have someone explain exactly how they control for age, if everyone in the range they want to study, is already dead.
What is the actual process to control for age? This comes up a lot, and the only response is "oh, well, we controlled for that", well exactly how?
Seriously, I'm curious.
//lot of downvotes, not a lot of anybody actually able to explain it.
From Article, the age question does seem sketchy.
"Although proportional mortality analyses do not provide information about the population at risk, with careful selection of controls and risk adjustment for factors that may affect competing risks (eg, age, sex, and social class), these values can still serve as a useful indicator of variations in disease frequency across different occupations.16 17"
As long as a researcher said "we controlled for confounding variables," there are plenty of people willing to take it at face value.
It's really difficult (maybe not possible) to do that in these large retrospective studies. Shingles vaccine preventing dementia, GLP-1 drugs preventing just about everything, etc, etc. There are plenty of good faith critiques of this kind of work from actual medical researchers making essentially the same point as the OP.