Conjugated Equine Estrogen (CEE) reduces breast cancer AFTER the trial is completed?

I awoke this morning to a press release from the AMA, and a front page NYT article declaring that, in a post-trial follow-up of the WHI study, CEE reduces breast cancer in the entire cohort of post-hysterectomy patients, and lowers CHD (coronary heart disease) risk in the youngest age stratum studied.

Here's a couple of links: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/estrogen-lowers-risk-of-heart-attack-and-breast-cancer-in-some/?src=me&ref=general

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/305/13/1305.short

Now why would that be?

One need look no further than the data in figures 2 and 5 to see that it's a Type I statistical error (a signigicant result is found by chance when the null hypothesis is true and there is in reality no effect) - that's why.

For the love of Jehovah, did this really make the headlines? The P-value for the breast cancer risk is....well, they don't give a P-value, but the upper bound of the 95% CI is 0.95 so the P-value is about 0.04, BARELY significant. Seriously? This is one of FIFTEEN (15) comparisons in Table 2 alone. Corrected for multiple comparisons, this is NOT a statistically significant effect, NOT EVEN CLOSE. I think I'm having PTSD from flashbacks to the NETT trial.

And table 5? There are TEN outcomes with THREE age strata for each outcome, so, what, 30 comparisons? And look at the width of the 95% CI for the youngest age stratum in the CHD outcome - wide. So there weren't a lot of patients in that group.
And nevermind the lack of an a priori hypothesis, or a legitimate reason to think some difference based on age strata might make biological sense.

Bad old habits die hard. Like a former colleague is fond of pointing out, don't assume that because an investigator does not have drug company ties that s/he is not biased. Government funding and entire careers are at stake if an idea that you've been pursuing for years yields to the truth and dies off. Gotta keep stoking the coals of incinerated ideas long enough to get tenure!