(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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So what we're seeing in the meta-analysis is basically a series of negative results being totally overset by a single positive result That is not great scientifically!pic.twitter.com/xv5a3lDScx
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It's a bit like tossing a coin 5 times, getting 4 tails and 1 heads, and concluding that heads is the right answer
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This is especially true when you consider that the p-value is 0.064, which means that these results aren't even ~technically~ significant in any model!
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But bringing this back to
#scicomm - how is a journalist meant to know this? It's complex stuff. Most scientists I know aren't comfortable re-running a meta-analysis to see what happens when you exclude studiesShow this thread -
And the press release, let's remember, is astonishingly positive. No mention of the MASSIVE question mark remaining after this research, just "pet owners more likely to have IBS"
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The real finding from this analysis is that there may be a very modest increase in risk of IBS from owning a pet, but this seems unlikely at present based on the totality of the evidence
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Who do we blame for the misreporting? I'll leave that to you There are many steps along the way that could've corrected this, but none were taken
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SMALL CORRECTION The forest plot I included earlier in the analysis of the random-effects model was from the log-transformed variables (oops) here's the plot once exponentiated:pic.twitter.com/Me4zJfoI6w
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Also, the p-value is 0.064 for this model, which is technically not significant. The effect size is also different from that reported in the abstract, however if I run a fixed effects model everything is exactly the same so I suspect that's what was actually done here
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End of conversation
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