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

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