Day 254 - 22 May 96 - Page 22
1
2 Q. But what I was asking was, when you talk about a growing
3 feeling you are not talking about people on the street, you
4 are talking about the medical scientific community?
5 A. Yes, I am.
6
7 Q. Right.
8
9 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Does that apply to -- I had assumed that
10 applied to -- all similar phases like growing awareness,
11 and then, in the very next line to the sentence Ms. Steel
12 has asked you to look at, general recognition. You are not
13 speaking of the population as a whole but of the medical
14 scientific community?
15 A. That is correct, my Lord, yes.
16
17 MS. STEEL: Can we have a look at the paper, the New England
18 Journal of Medicine paper, please. There is one thing that
19 I want to ask about this. I was reading it a bit late last
20 night and I was a bit tired when I was doing it, but in
21 this study they just looked back at the previous evidence
22 or the figures gathered from the previous studies, they did
23 not go back and recontact all these people?
24 A. Yes, they did, actually. They carried out a postal
25 questionnaire and they actually looked at the case records
26 of -- if you look at the paragraph on page 357, I think it
27 is.
28
29 Q. So that the follow-up they are talking about there was, is
30 it, in 1995 as opposed to follow-up in the studies that
31 were done because in the chart at the bottom it refers to
32 'years of follow-up'?
33 A. Yes. Basically, what they have done is to go back to
34 these previous studies and they have tried to analyse the
35 results, or the information, gained in those studies. So
36 they have gone back to the original information contained
37 within the studies, they have ignored the conclusions which
38 the previous people have reported in the studies. They
39 have gone back to the original data and analysed them all
40 in a consistent fashion so that they have been able to
41 amalgamate all the data culled from these individual
42 studies and they have tried to verify, for example, the
43 questionnaires which were submitted to patients, the
44 validity of the estimate of diet, and they have then
45 analysed the results in a standard statistical way to come
46 up with this overall result.
47
48 Q. Right, but ----
49
50 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That is why they had ended up with
51 information about nearly 5,000 cases from over a third of a
52 million women?
53 A. That is correct, my Lord.
54
55 Q. Including a third of a million women because of the
56 accumulation of numbers across all the studies; is that
57 right?
58 A. That is correct. Right.
59
60 MS. STEEL: Right. As I say, I was reading this late last night
