Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

I dislike it when articles make bizarre statements and take it for granted that the audience should accept it. Like:

But, standing to work has long known to be problematic, it is more tiring, it dramatically increases the risks of carotid atherosclerosis (ninefold) because of the additional load on the circulatory system, and it also increases the risks of varicose veins, so standing all day is unhealthy.

Where do they get that?? Citations, please! It took me a bit to find all the background research and read up on it. Interesting stuff.

That being said, still prefer the standing desk. My standing desk at home is right by my bed, so it's really easy to fall back and change my position when needed, and I'm worried about carotid atherosclerosis or varicose veins. :)

See also what the book 59 has to say about lying down and creativity. :)

Some background info I found for anyone more interested in this.

http://www.slideshare.net/inspiringlife/are-you-an-accidenta...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10901115

""" Significant relationships were found between the amount of standing at work and atherosclerotic progression. After adjustment for the heaviness of the work, psychosocial job factors, income, and biological and behavioral risk factors, the mean change in maximum IMT for those standing not at all, a little, a lot, and very much was 0.24, 0.25, 0.28, and 0.33 mm, respectively. For men with IHD the respective changes were 0.08, 0.15, 0.37, and 0.75 mm -- a 9-fold difference between the no-exposure and high-exposure group. For the men with carotid stenosis, the respective difference was 3-fold. """

Do I read this correctly in saying that for men without IHD, the ones who stood all day had their artery walls thicken by 0.33mm over four years while those who stood not at all had theirs thicken by 0.24mm? And that the nine-fold increase is only for people with ischaemic heart disease? So the article is wrong: it's not 900% but 37% in people who don't have IHD?

The idea is that thicker artery walls are associated with heart disease, right? Is there reason to believe the relationship is linear? Otherwise we can't say that because we saw a nine-fold difference in delta IMT that we expect a ninefold increase in risk.

> The idea is that thicker artery walls are associated with heart disease, right?

Right, except, if you've every scrubbed in for a carotid endarterectomy, the culprit is a lesion full of cholesterol and inflammation, not a diffuse thickening.

> Is there reason to believe the relationship is linear?

Well, yes and no. Things that cause atherosclerosis tend to have linear relationships with the disease. So if you find a new relationship, you expect it to be linear. Problem is, their analysis has to pile on a lot of other stuff before you find a relationship. And "Have the disease" is a pretty big step function compared to the other things they control for. Notice also that N goes way down in those severe subgroup analyses (tables 2 and 3)

The slideshow appears to be an extended ad for an automatic foot massager.

Hehe, yeah, I realized that after I read through it. But I found the first couple of slides interesting. Maybe I should edit it out. But I did find the first few slides interesting.

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