The first thing I do when I see a headline like this is try to find a press release. It gives you a lot of insight into how the story came about This is what I foundhttps://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/ddw/79919 …
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The story appears to be from a study presented as an abstract at the American Gastroenterology Association's national conference This is an immediate red flagpic.twitter.com/XPMMXSFh6c
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It's also worth noting that the title and lede of the press release are really, really bad If you only read these two sentences, what message would you get???pic.twitter.com/ADoxGfpi44
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So the story is from a poster presentation at a conference What this means in practice: - preliminary research - not peer-reviewed - likely to change before publication - less likely to be correct
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The story gets even murkier from here. If you look at the published manuscript, the odds ratio is only ~just~ significant, which means that this was quite a tenuous relationshippic.twitter.com/xYSMNNHgZb
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(Worth noting that there was no suggestion anywhere that this was a causal relationship until the press release, any speculation about the causes is totally hypothetical at this point)
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What this tenuous relationship means, in practice, is that pet owners could have anywhere between a 1.8% or 57% increased odds of IBS, which is quite a wide range which verges on 0% increase at the bottom end
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The authors helpfully include a forest plot for their study at the bottom Take a look and see what you thinkpic.twitter.com/7yY0GyUlWE
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Having seen this plot, are you more or less confident in the statement that IBS is associated with pet ownership?
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Replying to @GidMK
Let me guess, they used a fixed effects model.pic.twitter.com/bU5Ay67PM5
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Well, they report using a random effects model, but if I run that it doesn't return a significant result 
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