Commentary: This study failed?

Abstract

In summary, the results of Sesso et al. constitute one of many contributions to the literature on tea in relation to CHD and stroke. The great strength of these most recent contributions is their precision. The validity considerations are mixed, as the study shares the strengths and the limitations of most of the other cohort studies in comparison with the case-control studies. Of course these results have no potential by themselves to constitute an exclusive basis for aetiological judgements or policy recommendations. Given that the follow-Lip period closed in 1995, 6 years before our review was published, we conjecture (perhaps self-flatteringly) that we might have played some small role in bringing these results to light. If so, we are grateful, for we suspect that the published results on tea in relation to CHD and stroke remain but a small and possibly unrepresentative fraction of all the results on this topic that lie resting in the figurative file drawers of epidemiological researchers around the world.