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Ras Mud And A Cup Of Coffee Summary

Decent Essays

In “ras Mutations and a cup of coffee: cause, confounder, effect modifier, or what else?” Paolo Vineis argues the correlation of an outcome occurring after an exposure doesn’t necessarily indicate such outcome was caused by such exposure. He recognizes that medicine, in particular attempts to correlate cause-effect relations in hopes of preventing or curing, thus eliminating the causal agent. Nonetheless, Vinies argues cause-effect relations are more complicated. In his letter, he uses the correlation of coffee consumption with pancreatic cancer. During his time period, Professor McMahon from Harvard University published a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, claiming the risk of pancreatic cancer increased with high consumption of coffee. Nonetheless, several …show more content…

A considerable amount of the studies suggested the association with coffee was probably because the majority of coffee consumers tend to be heavy tobacco smokers, thus tobacco consumption is the exposure and coffee is a confounding factor leading to pancreatic cancer. Additionally, it is critical to note coffee is the most common beverage consumed around the world, thus difficult to make a correlation of cause-effect relation with coffee. Nonetheless, Miguel Porta and colleagues suggested coffee is likely playing a different role—other than exposure and confounder— in pancreatic cancer. They suggest it is either acting as induction or inhibition of metabolic pathways, thus activating or deactivating carcinogenic chemicals. The other proposal is that coffee is inhibiting the relevant DNA repair mechanisms. Vinies states the second reasoning seems more realistic due to supportive information. As you can see, throughout his letter, Vinies argues longitudinal study designs with repeated measures are necessary to eliminate possible confounders altering

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