Choose a health risk that applies to you and find the absolute and relative risk for the development of at least one disease stemming from this risk. 

Choose a health risk that applies to you and find the absolute and relative risk for the development of at least one disease stemming from this risk.

Most people have trouble understanding the results of health research and how those results may apply to them. Part of the difficulty stems from the way that results are reported and the inclusion of numbers that are essential to research and statistical analysis.

One confusion involves the terms absolute risk and relative risk, both of which are terms from epidemiology research.

If a person’s risk for a disease is expressed in terms of absolute risk, the risk seems very small, but if expressed in terms of relative risk, the risk seems much larger.

For example, in the case of lung cancer, the absolute risk is about 1 in 1,000 per year, which means that about 1 out of 1,000 smokers will die of lung cancer in any given year. However, the relative risk is about 23 times higher for smokers than for nonsmokers.

There are many examples of health risks in which the relative and absolute risk are quite different (i.e., obesity, diabetes, sedentary lifestyle, alcohol, etc.).

For this discussion, choose a health risk that applies to you and find the absolute and relative risk for the development of at least one disease stemming from this risk.

You may choose either behavioral risks such as smoking or sedentary lifestyle or inherent risks such as family background, ethnicity, or gender.  Share the results of your investigation.