One of the common ways the media misrepresent statistics about risk is that the reported risk is not necessarily your risk. What is the underlying problem that causes this? Unless you personally participated in the study, your personal risk cannot be calculated. Since risks describe what proportion of the population will encounter a certain situation, they cannot be used to find any individual's chances of encountering that situation. confounding variables, which may differ for you and those in the study not establishing a causal link between the variables