A study recently made massive, international news for reportedly showing that normal glasses may protect against COVID-19 Let's do a brief peer-review on twitter, because this is wild 1/npic.twitter.com/T94hRFvfXU
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4/n Now, usually what you'd do here is identify one group of people with glasses, one without, and follow them up through time to see if the infection rates were different This is what's known as a cohort study
5/n Another way of doing this research would be to look at people who have caught COVID-19, and another group who haven't, and compare them in terms of the proportion who wear glasses This is called a case-control study, and is what these researchers appear to have donepic.twitter.com/yn6yCxsm1Q
6/n Essentially, the cases (COVID-19 patients) wore glasses less than controls (non-COVID-19 patients), which might indicate that glasses prevented COVID-19 infection So far so good, right?
7/n Well, there are a few immediate and obvious snags Snag 1: small sample size. We have <300 cases and no information on controls. That's weird, and problematic (usually these studies are much bigger)pic.twitter.com/XlgaAoXkB8
8/n Snag 2: The outcome measure isn't wearing glasses. The study actually appears to compare short-sightedness percentages between the cases and controls, which is an obviously imperfect measurepic.twitter.com/16EPba7jxB
9/n (It's imperfect because not everyone who wears glasses is myopic and not everyone who is myopic wears glasses >8hrs per day)
10/n But then we hit the biggest snag of all The control population You see, the authors didn't actually collect a control sample. The rate of myopia here is from ANOTHER STUDY ENTIRELYpic.twitter.com/YH4f5BlDBK
11/n Not only that, but the study was conducted IN 1987 and the extrapolation is just weirdly moved forward from then This makes NO SENSE AT ALLpic.twitter.com/2RpQyPbyhY
12/n I honestly don't know what to say here. They're comparing the rate of myopia in a group of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 to the research findings of physical fitness of students from 1987 You can't draw any meaning from that!
13/n These two groups are so wildly different that it's entirely impossible to say whether the glasses had the slightest impact on anything at all, it's just very strange speculation
14/n Maybe glasses DO prevent COVID-19 transmission, but based on this research we have absolutely no idea if that's true
15/n The ABSOLUTE BEST you can say from this research is that it appears that fewer patients diagnosed with COVID-19 from a single hospital in Hubei had myopia than some high-school students in '87 It's not even about glasses!
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