The big alcohol study that didn't happen
I for one wish that they&#x27;d just do the study properly. Sure, it&#x27;s now tainted beyond all belief, but it&#x27;s such a societally important question that it&#x27;s rather amazing we don&#x27;t have a good answer to the question of how bad (or otherwise) light to moderate drinking is for you. Such a huge chunk of the population does it!<p>If we look at another societal thing that historically a huge chunk of the population did -- smoking -- it was known that it kills you, horribly, but it took taken more than sixty to eighty years for the public to get that message, and now society is slowly adjusting [at least in Europe] with real public benefits. <i>If</i> an effect is present with alcohol, even a small one, the integrated effect would be massive and it&#x27;s a very scientifically valid question to ask.<p>Alcohol is really interesting -- people under report how much they drink, and how much they under report is a function both of the amount of booze, and the covariates that affect life expectancy like education (Prof Raymond Caroll at Texas A&amp;M has an excellent book on this -- there&#x27;s a method to correct for it by bootstrapping called SIMEX -- e.g. applied in [1], in which a sample of about 3000 adolescents and young adults around the age of 20 shows that binge drinking &quot;may not be causally related to deficiencies in working memory, response inhibition or emotion recognition&quot;). The paucity and conflicting of evidence <i>probably</i> means that the effect size is small, but the error bars are huge and as the article says, the covariates are many. It&#x27;s just a shame that we can&#x27;t have nice things because of the bent actions of a few.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1111&#x2F;add.15100?casa_token=1nfaRFOd2oMAAAAA:3-IYEmp3ysQ9imMnOJAOZJxFmlggPZHZlLwpFAYh437iYjs_InPj6-nAx0QFp87dMlJDus0SwD9g9UI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1111&#x2F;add.15100?c...</a>