How different were these studies? Well, a commonly-used measure to assess heterogeneity is the I^2 statistic. A value between 0-50% is considered "low" This study found I^2 between 96-98% (except for one subgroup analysis)pic.twitter.com/h078Q4zngn
Epidemiologist. Writer (Guardian, Observer etc). "Well known research trouble-maker". PhDing at @UoW Host of @senscipod Email gidmk.healthnerd@gmail.com he/him
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How different were these studies? Well, a commonly-used measure to assess heterogeneity is the I^2 statistic. A value between 0-50% is considered "low" This study found I^2 between 96-98% (except for one subgroup analysis)pic.twitter.com/h078Q4zngn
This makes sense, because the studies that they found were VERY DIFFERENT For example, one study looked at ~everyone in Sweden~, while another looked only at elderly women with hypertensionpic.twitter.com/ar19xXbniu
But that wasn't the biggest issue The biggest issue was that this piece of research didn't look at confounding factors At allpic.twitter.com/z7jrTWYspY
Now, I bang on about observational research and the problems with causality, but that's usually in well-controlled studies where residual confounding might potentially be an issue
Here, we have a piece of research that didn't control for any factors other than dog ownership ~at all~ It's not hard to see how this might make the results a bit problematicpic.twitter.com/9ZY2Jp6csH
Essentially, it means that this study just looked at a simple association Dog owners die a bit less than non-owners That's it!
Dog owners are often very different to non-owners in important ways From the Swedish study I mentioned above, owners were more educated, married more often, more likely to have kids, etcpic.twitter.com/LmYkqrlFuE
What this means is that there are literally hundreds of explanations for dog owners being more healthy than non-owners that have nothing to do with the dogs Funnily enough, that's something that the authors noted in the studypic.twitter.com/BWzTi99vJs
Basically, healthy people might be more likely to buy dogs Thus, dog owners die less Association rather than causation
And the mechanisms of dogs saving our lives are a bit flimsy. Some minor reductions in blood pressure =/= lifesaving
So...puppies probably aren't saving our lives They're still great tho, you should definitely get one Adopt, don't shop!pic.twitter.com/n0a6UOHvZf
Hallo the unroll you asked for: Thread by @GidMK: "This study has gone a bit viral because apparently puppies are going to save our lives Sadly, that's pretty unlikely to […]" https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182048532347310080.html …
See you soon. 
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