Reducing your risk of death

More or Less: Behind the Stats

BBC

Business, Mathematics, Science, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2019

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Two statistics about reducing your risk of an early death made headlines around the world recently. The first seems to be a great reason to add a four-legged friend to your life. It suggests that owning a dog is tied to lowering your chance of dying early by nearly a quarter. The second statistic claims that even a minimal amount of running is linked to reducing your risk of premature death by up to 30%. Ruth Alexander finds out what’s behind these numbers and we hear from epidemiologist, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz. Producer: Darin Graham

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.
0:06.2	I'm Ruth Alexander and this is the programme that seeks to understand more about the numbers
0:11.2	all around us.
0:12.8	Two statistics about death made news headlines around the world recently.
0:17.3	The first came up this week.
0:19.0	Any amount of running reduces risk of early death, study finds.
0:23.5	Even a little running cuts risk of premature death.
0:26.5	News study shows.
0:27.9	The second was in the news last month.
0:30.1	Want to live longer? Try getting a dog.
0:32.7	Having a dog cuts your risk of dying by 24%.
0:36.6	News from the Guardian, CNN and Inc.com.
0:39.6	Well, we thought we tried to find out if dogs and running can really do that.
0:44.1	Hit helpers is Lizzie McNeil, who's back and has carried out an inquiry into some of these numbers.
0:49.2	Pile is he.
0:49.8	Hi Ruth, it's good to be back.
0:51.6	So how about we start with where these statistics come from?
0:54.9	Yet, well, we should start by saying that the dog statistic and the running statistic
0:58.9	are from two separate papers that are not connected.
1:02.1	The dog paper included data from over a dozen individual studies and combined them in a meta-analysis
1:07.4	to come up with one figure.
1:09.8	Most of the data come from death registries from around the world.
	...

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