The gripping headline ‘Why Binge Watching Your TV Box-Sets Could Kill You’ arose from an epidemiological study that estimated an adjusted relative risk of 2.5 for a fatal pulmonary embolism associated with watching more than 5 hours TV a night compared with less than 2.5 hours. But careful scrutiny of the absolute rate in the high-risk group (13 in 158,000 person-years) could be translated as meaning you can expect to watch more than 5 hours TV a night for 12,000 years before experiencing the event. This somewhat lessens the impact.14
