[MistahKoala]

"But one local demographic variable did stand out as being protective"

What does 'protective' mean in this context? I wondered if it was somehow a typo of 'predictive', but that's a bit of a leap for a typo.

[nyolfen]

you see it in medical literature; i believe it just means what it sounds like, ie that living in the environment they describe makes one statistically less likely to be a hiki