We just can’t resist posting on a story that quotes a drug-company executive speaking in Latin.
“It’s post hoc ergo propter hoc,” said Joseph Camardo, Wyeth’s SVP of global medical affairs. Huh?
Oh, we get it: He was using a Latin expression for a fallacy of logic that means “after it, therefore because of it,” as the WSJ explains.
The “it,” in this case, is a decrease in use of hormone-replacement drugs after one part of a big government study of called the Women’s Health Initiative looking Wyeth’s Prempro, was halted in 2002. The data linked Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin, to increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and breast cancer.
Before 2002, about 210,000 U.S. women each year were diagnosed with breast cancer. After 2002, the number suddenly dropped to 190,000 a year and stayed there through 2005, the latest year in which figures are available.
So basically, what Camardo is saying is that just because the breast cancer rate dropped after a lot of people stopped taking Prempro, doesn’t mean those stoppages are why the breast-cancer rate dropped. He notes, for instance, that mammography was increasing in the late ’90s, causing more cancers to be detected around that time.
Fancy language aside, government researchers weren’t buying Wyeth’s argument. A new analysis of the data, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that the decline in breast-cancer around that time didn’t have to do with mammography. They argued the drop in use of the hormone drugs was the root of the breast-cancer decline.
Image: Associated Press