Reply #30: But the authors don't come to that conclusion - [View All]

all they say is that antibiotic use and breast cancer are associated. Association does not mean causation, although it can help. And while I still haven't been able to read the article (bloody journals who put out press releases before sending the journals to scientists!) those issues that you raise have surely occurred to the authors and there will be some discussion of it at least in the discussion section of the actual paper.

Just for the mental exercise, you might want to think about how you'd design a study to address the questions you raise. Bear in mind breast cancer is rare, so you'd probably want to use a case-control design, which compares a group of patients with disease to a group of controls who are disease-free but in all other ways similar to the patients, and see how the two groups differ on the question you're concerned about. How would you assess that difference, and how would you compare it? This assignment will be due a week before the end of the semester - ooops, just joking, professor reflexes... ;-)