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GidMK's profile
Health Nerd
Health Nerd
Health Nerd
Verified account
@GidMK

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Health NerdVerified account

@GidMK

Epidemiologist. Writer (Guardian, Observer etc). "Well known research trouble-maker". PhDing at @UoW Host of @senscipod Email gidmk.healthnerd@gmail.com he/him

Sydney, New South Wales
theguardian.com/profile/gideon…
Joined November 2015

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    1. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      Having seen this plot, are you more or less confident in the statement that IBS is associated with pet ownership?

      2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      See, the thing is, that top study appears to be contributing the ENTIRE association. Every other study found no result at all, but one single study has caused the entire relationship to become statistically significantpic.twitter.com/pcW30Bzkhm

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      Show this thread
    3. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      Being the nerd I am, I decided to rerun the meta analysis on their sample using the metan command in Stata This is a bit quick and dirty, but using a random-effects model with an inverse variance, I get these resultspic.twitter.com/s95D5VYPQ7

      2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
      Show this thread
    4. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      For the epi nerds, when I run it with a fixed-effects model my results are the same as those reported in the paper, but my random-effects model CI crosses 0 🤔

      2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
      Show this thread
    5. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      But now comes the interesting part - what happens if I take out that single paper that appears to be driving the result? What do you reckon?

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      Show this thread
    6. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      Here's the result. The association disappears completely It looks like one study is driving all of these resultspic.twitter.com/hcmXJePEol

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
      Show this thread
    7. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      So what is this study? Essentially, a simple observational survey of people in Singaporepic.twitter.com/H2qxbLvGJD

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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    8. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      Now, I'm not going to critique this piece of research in-depth, but I think it's worth noting that it only surveyed 300 people, of whom 80 had IBS The other studies looked at a total of ~2,500 people

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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    9. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      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

      2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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    10. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      It's a bit like tossing a coin 5 times, getting 4 tails and 1 heads, and concluding that heads is the right answer

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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      Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

      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!

      6:22 PM - 26 May 2019
      • 3 Likes
      • 😷jamesbudday🆘(She/her)BLM 🌈 💧 Ian "Department of Diseasology" 🍩 Musgrave Todd Cameron AZ x2 💥💪
      2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

          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 studies

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        3. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

          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"

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        4. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

          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

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        5. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

          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

          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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        6. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

          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

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        7. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019

          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

          0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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        8. End of conversation
        1. New conversation
        2.  💧 Ian "Department of Diseasology"  🍩 Musgrave‏ @ianfmusgrave 26 May 2019
          Replying to @GidMK

          Wait... What???

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Health Nerd‏Verified account @GidMK 26 May 2019
          Replying to @ianfmusgrave

          Yeh look, their CI didn't cross 0, but if you re-calculate the results using a random-effects model p=0.064. I think it's fair to still report this as technically "significant", but it's not a strong result

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
        4. End of conversation

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