The study's good design "provides a basis to infer causeandeffect" between poverty and bad health, said Dr. Robert Califf, a noted Duke University cardiologist who is leading a massive study on neighborhoods and health outcomes.
This was an observational study of roughly 16, 000 women, so it was not able to establish a causeandeffect relationship between taking the supplements and death, but the correlation was significant.
While the study did indeed identify a striking correlation, researchers were unclear what actually drove this cause-and-effect relationship, with skeptics pointing out that a number of factors may have caused this link which were uncontrolled for in the study.