I fear though, that this report, like the ones on low fat, will be disputed as being flawed and the medical community will continue to tell people to avoid salt at all costs!

Alcinda

This strikes me as a statistical fudge to increase the significance of the results. The best way to deal with people lost to follow-up is to drop them from all statistical calculations and therefore results.
The next best, in my opinion, is to assume that they had a similar mortality rate to the population with follow-up. It is unreasonable to assume that everybody lost to follow-up at that point is still alive. Approximately 19% (1343 out of 7154) of the rest of this sample were deceased at the time of the analysis.
This would seem to create a negative bias (i.e. that the study is understating the significance of the data) to the results because it is clear that there would have been deaths in this subgroup. If (admittedly a very big if) they were similar to the larger group, it would strengthen the association between lower salt intake and total mortality and possibly the other mortalities. In my quick glance at the paper, it is unclear how many were lost to follow-up.
However or possibly in addition to the negative bias, it also needs to be taken into consideration that counting the missing data points as having determinate outcomes (i.e. they are alive) unfairly strengthens the statistical power of the results, creating a positive bias to the results,(i.e. the study is overstating the significance of the data).
Thanks in advance for allowing me the space to use this blog to express my viewpoint or to stimulate my thought processes if you don’t choose to publish it.