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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

I'm a mathematical illiterate (no really, and I'm not proud). The headline hurts my head - does "risk 10 times lower" mean that there is one 10th of the risk? so a 1 in 10 chance becomes 1 in 100?

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> does "risk 10 times lower" mean that there is one 10th of the risk? so a 1 in 10 chance becomes 1 in 100?

There’s no way to tell from reading the article, you’d need to read the paper. From the article it’s not clear whether it’s the 2.5x increased risk that’s decreased to 1.25x, or whether people on antiviral meds had a lower risk than the control group (0.25x).

From the abstract: "These authors report that infection with a different herpes virus, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV1), leads to a similarly increased risk of later developing SD [Senile Dementia]. Further, when the authors looked at patients treated aggressively with antiherpetic medications at the time, the relative risk of SD was reduced by a factor of 10. [...] antiherpetic medication prevented later SD development in 90% of their study group"

So yes.

Source: https://sci-hub.tw/10.3233/jad-180266#

Yes, this is exactly the kind of question I wanted to ask, but was to embarrassed to ask. Thank you! (also suffering from functional maths illiteracy, although I suspect mathematicians would say functional arithmetic illiteracy)

The way I understand it - let's say in a control group 1 in 100 got the disease in a predetermined period of time, 10 times lower risk means that in the group that got the treatment 1 out of 1000 people contracted the disease...

That’s not because you’re mathematically illiterate (though that may be true), but because it’s a bad title.

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