They then pooled the numbers from all of these studies into a meta-analysis, which showed that owning a dog was associated with a 24% decreased risk of death, overallpic.twitter.com/J72bvsJGgQ
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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They then pooled the numbers from all of these studies into a meta-analysis, which showed that owning a dog was associated with a 24% decreased risk of death, overallpic.twitter.com/J72bvsJGgQ
So why am I not going out to corral every dog I can find? Well, there were a few significant issues with the studypic.twitter.com/Jjx2YE3zBX
First up, we have what's known as statistical heterogeneity Basically, this means that the studies that the researchers found and analyzed together were very different, making the analysis less reliablepic.twitter.com/hJwm6VVoLV
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!
Lol, true. Should've said "die less over the course of a median follow-up of 10.1 years", but that's a bit too wordy
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