Research has once again shown the benefit of eating fruit or
vegetable. Yesterday the news media was full
of headlines like this:
“Fabulous” I thought.
“I wonder where this research came from?”
So I decided to follow the research back to
its origins - a fairly straightforward task. It turns out that the
research was published in the British Medical Journal’s Christmas edition – a traditionally
light-hearted edition often with slightly less-than-serious research articles.
For example, here is a selection of the titles of other articles
in the Christmas 2013 edition:
The good news is that many of the articles are open access
so you could download them and use them with students to show what a research
paper looks like and how they are structured.
The light-hearted topics means that they are more ‘accessible’ than
traditional research papers, but are still structured in the same way. It could also be used to look at how computer
modelling is used to look at the potential effectiveness of medical
interventions without actually carrying out the intervention.
If you want to do that then the link to the apple story is here.
I heard/read a number of comments about the value of
prescribing an apple instead of statins, such as this tweet:
I wondered about the cost-effectiveness of prescribing an
apple a day to the population over 50 (around 21 million people according to this source). Pleasingly,
the authors of the paper actually calculate the cost of prescribing statins (to
everyone over 50 who isn’t already taking them for other medical reasons) and the
cost of prescribing apples.
Cost of additional Statins: £180 million
Cost of apples: £260 million
So, if the NHS were to prescribe apple, which I envisage to
be a little like fruit time in primary school, it would cost more than £80
million MORE than prescribing statins.
Of course, the statins have additional side effects which
would have to be taken into account. The
authors also assumed that calorie intake would remain the same if everyone ate
an apple, but that might not be the case, so the side effects from that should
also be considered.
Interesting questions to ask:
- Why might people be happy to pay for an ‘apple a day’, but not a ‘statin’ a day?
- Could/Should the NHS prescribe fruit&vegetables in the same way that they prescribe medications?
- The authors assume a 70% compliance rate in eating the apple – is this realistic?
- Should researchers spend time writing light-hearted research articles?
- Why did the news media pick up on the story, and report it without comment on the reasons why it was written?
Enjoy, and do let me know if you use this in class.
