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Key takeaways: > Researchers... looked at more than 128,000 patients admitted to hospital for a heart attack, and more than 68,000 heart attack deaths in Quebe
by Red_Tarsius 9y ago
Key takeaways:
> Researchers... looked at more than 128,000 patients admitted to hospital for a heart attack, and more than 68,000 heart attack deaths in Quebec between 1981 and 2014 from November to April. They also got weather information... and used it to track snowfall prior to the admission to hospital and/or death.
> Among the men, a third of the heart attacks occurred the day after a snowfall. The association between shovelling and heart attack was very strong. If the snow fell for two to three days, the association between shovelling and a heart attack was even stronger. The correlation was true regardless of the patient's age, the presence or absence of cardiovascular risk like high blood pressure or other health conditions.
> But here's the thing. The correlation was only true for men – not women. The researchers say they suspect that shovelling caused heart attacks because men are more likely than women to shovel snow. That may be true, or it might be a sexist assumption. But there may be another explanation for the findings: that women shovel snow in a way that doesn't cause heart attacks.
> Men age 50 and older with heart disease should avoid shovelling snow period.
Why is it sexist to assume that snow shoveling is mostly done by men? It sounds more plausible than secret shoveling techniques.
- viraptor 9y agoSexist? The assumption itself would be slightly. But in this case assuming it would also be unscientific. And I feel that it's weird they didn't do even a quick check (walk the streets in the morning, or ask people - get a valid sample). Then they'd both have better information and avoid the weird wording.
- Dirlewanger 9y agoBecause discussing anything gender/identity-related nowadays has become bereft of all logic and always comes with emotional baggage.
- throwmeaway987 9y agoOh does it? Does it become emotional?
- astura 9y agoJesus, no, not at all, I have no idea why you'd jump to such wild conclusion as it's actually very informative and an important piece of information. I have no idea what sort of "emotion baggage" would cause the authors to write that, that would be really odd. They are merely acknowledging the premise is based solely on gender roles and not any sort of data they have collected or any preliminary observations. The alternative would be something like "we drove around town for an hour and observed that 80% of people shoveling snow at that time were men so our hypothesis is the reason for the sex difference is men do most of the shoveling. This needs more rigorous data collection to verify." Or even "in our personal experience most of the household shoveling is done by men." It could have been worded better to be more clear.
- Dirlewanger 9y ago>It could have been worded better to be more clear. But it wasn't, and what we have from them is a needlessly adversarial conclusion. I don't know why you're trying to make excuses for them. This is the norm for news outlets nowadays.
- ozim 9y agoCould be also that men are more angry that they have to shovel or they are doing so more dynamically without warmup. Where women are less annoyed or do it slower not with secret techniques.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago> Why is it sexist to assume that snow shoveling is mostly done by men? They don't actually say that, they say that it's either true, or it's a sexist assumption. So they only imply its a sexist assumption in the hypothetical where it's false.
- astura 9y agoRight, they are saying basically "We are just going to assume that is the reason but we know it is sexist to assume that and not based on any hard data." They are acknowledging that their premise is based entirely on gender roles and not on anything else, not on data they collected and not on any sort of preliminary observation.
- kaitai 9y agoIt's just not good science. Why assume "most shoveling done by men" when you could also have "women are rate limited by arms that are on average weaker" for instance? There are plenty of other ideas to float, too. As a sibling poster mentions, I'd like it if they'd gone out & done a bit of surveying on this (send undergrads on a walk to record observations or something).