Your Drink Choices Can Lead to Ulcerative Colitis

Alcohol, which can cause other health problems, is a candidate for being a risk factor for developing ulcerative colitis. However, this was not borne out by the data. The researchers determined that alcohol consumption was not a significant risk factor.

Any effect alcohol had was statistically insignificant and, depending on how you looked at the data, the change in relative was insignificantly protective or insignificantly harmful. It was either a lower relative risk by 5% or a higher risk by 8%, both of which were too close to the confidence interval--a measure of how much the data likely applies to the population at large--to be accurate. The difference in relative risk could have been randomness from the limited subset of the population.