Tag Archives: cancer

06Jun / 2022

Cancer and statistics

Hannah Fry works with statistics and risk, but her perspective changed when she was diagnosed with cancer. Fry documented the experience and it’s available on BBC:

Hannah Fry, a professor of maths, is used to investigating the world around her through numbers. When she’s diagnosed with cervical cancer at the age of 36, she starts to interrogate the way we diagnose and treat cancer by digging into the statistics to ask whether we are making the right choices in how we treat this disease. Are we sometimes too quick to screen and treat cancer? Do doctors always speak to us honestly about the subject? It may seem like a dangerous question to ask, but are we at risk of overmedicalising cancer?

At the same time, Hannah records her own cancer journey in raw and emotional personal footage, where the realities of life after a cancer diagnosis are laid bare.

You can only watch the film in the UK for now, but she spoke about the topic on the Numberphile podcast. Worth a listen.

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Posted by in cancer, Hannah Fry, Numberphile, Risk, statistics

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03Nov / 2021

Where cancer risk is greater due to air pollution

Based on five years of data from EPA models, ProPublica mapped areas in the United States where cancer risk is higher due to air pollution:

In all, ProPublica identified more than a thousand hot spots of cancer-causing air. They are not equally distributed across the country. A quarter of the 20 hot spots with the highest levels of excess risk are in Texas, and almost all of them are in Southern states known for having weaker environmental regulations. Census tracts where the majority of residents are people of color experience about 40% more cancer-causing industrial air pollution on average than tracts where the residents are mostly white. In predominantly Black census tracts, the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution is more than double that of majority-white tracts.

Interact with the full map here.

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Posted by in cancer, maps, pollution, ProPublica

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11Aug / 2015

The Price is Right winner and cancer survivor calculates the odds

Elisa Long, a professor in Decisions, Operations, and Technology Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, was diagnosed with breast cancer. The Price is Right films a breast cancer awareness episode every August. Long wanted to get on that show. So she watched episodes during her 6-hour chemotherapy sessions to familiarize herself with games and rules, and most importantly, to maximize her odds of winning.

Long describes her thought process and probability calculations on her way to surviving cancer and winning it all on The Price is Right.

My goal in going on "The Price Is Right" was to play the best I possibly could given tremendous uncertainty about the outcome. The same was true for my breast cancer. The stakes were just higher.

Ah, the uncertainty of life.

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Posted by in cancer, game theory, probability, statistics, survival, The Price is Right

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