Richard Gaspar's List: Dad

• after a frustrating and prolonged search (this was in a time long before the internet was available) I found no evidence at all. I came to understand that the reason why I could not find it was because it DID NOT EXIST.

• There had been some work done on rabbits in the nineteen fifties, which seemed to show that rabbit female sex hormones had some beneficial effect on cholesterol levels in the blood. Some, other research showed that oestrogen lowered LDL and raised HDL, a bit, and that was pretty much all there was.

  To my surprise (I would be completely unsurprised today), no-one had ever done a study on humans, and no controlled clinical trial existed. The entire area of research into this area resembled a vast barren desert, with a few tumbleweeds blowing in the wind.
• hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was indeed highly protective against cardiovascular disease (CVD). A forty two per cent reduction in strokes and heart disease, no less (1)
• As it turns out, women who took HRT - before it became widely promoted - were a different breed. They were extremely health conscious, more highly educated, and from higher social groups. They smoked less, they exercised more, and they had higher paying jobs. You name a confounding variable, and it varied.
• In order to confirm that everyone was now doing the right thing, a controlled study was set up to prove the benefits of taking HRT - the HERS study (The Heart and Estrogen / Progestin Replacement Study). Unfortunately, the HERS study proved the exact opposite to that which had been expected. It showed that HRT actually increased the risk of both heart disease and stroke. Not by a great amount, but enough to make it strongly statistically significant. It turned out that the 'fact' (female sex hormones protect against heart disease,) which was never based on any evidence in the first place, was proven to be untrue. Hold the front page, 'Unproven fact disproved'
• When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason.' Thucydides from 2,400 years ago.
• The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science.' Wilfred Trotter 1941.
• Scientists are just the same as normal mortals - only more so. However, to a far greater extent than most people, scientists become very closely associated with the ideas that they believe in.
• The reality is that, once a scientist comes to believe that a hypothesis is correct e.g. heart disease is caused by eating saturated fat, which raises cholesterol levels, which causes thickening in arteries which leads to heart attacks and strokes - the ‘diet-heart/cholesterol hypothesis'. Once you believe this, and write articles on it, and gain awards for researching it, and make it your life's work. How easy is it to change?

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