meta-analysis
lborkowski | January 28, 2015Evidence has been accumulating about the toll of prolonged sitting, and a new systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows just how harmful sedentary habits can be. University of Toronto researcher Aviroop Biswas and colleagues performed a quantitative meta-analyses on 41 studies that measured adults’ sedentary time and reported health outcomes directly associated with death, disease, or use of healthcare services.
Their findings won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following this research. “Greater sedentary time was found to be positively…
oracknows | May 19, 2014May I just say something again? (Actually, it's my blog; so I'll say it if I want to regardless of whether you want me to or not.) You know that "hypothesis" that vaccines cause autism, the one that has been at the core of the modern antivaccine movement over the last 15 years or so? Well, it's not pining for the fjords, if you know what I mean. No it's not pinin'! It's passed on! This "hypothesis" is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet it's maker! (Well, actually, since one of its makers, Andrew Wakefield, is still around, I'm not sure what in practice that actually…
oracknows | March 8, 2013So I finally made it to the Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Symposium. Thanks to the snowstorm that apparently wasn't (at least, I don't see any snow around), my arrival was delayed by a day, as all flights to the Washington, DC area were canceled on Wednesday. But I did finally get here, and, although I missed most of the first day, I did at least get to see a talk given by a friend of mine late in the day and I had a chance to hang out for a while with an old friend.
I also got the chance after I got back to my hotel room to be highly amused by a "response" to criticism from the author…
oracknows | September 11, 2012I sense a disturbance in the skeptical blogosphere. It is something that I half-expected, but, even so, it nonetheless somewhat surprised me when it arrived in the form of comments on my blog and e-mails from readers, fellow supporters of science-based medicine, and others asking me what I thought. In a way, it makes me glad that I didn't blog about this back on Monday, when the study that is the focus of this disturbance was published. Had I written about it then, all I would have had as fodder was the study itself. However, waiting a couple of days has allowed me to see the reaction of the…
edyong | April 19, 2009
A large study weighs up the existing evidence on the impact of GM crops on local insect life, providing some much-needed scientific rigour to the GM debate.
In Europe, the 'GM debate' about the merits and dangers of genetically-modified (GM) crops is a particularly heated one. There is a sense of unease about the power of modern genetic technology, and a gut feeling that scientists are 'playing God'. These discontents are stoked by the anti-GM camp, who describe GM crops with laden and fear-mongering bits of unspeak like 'Frankenstein foods' and 'unnatural'.
In a debate so fuelled by…
ddobbs | February 25, 2008I've not had time to thoroughly read this yet. But on the heels of another study published a few weeks ago (I blogged on it here) showing that SSRIs have little therapeutic effect if you include the (unflattering) clinical trials the industry had previously hidden, PLOS Medicine now publishes a larger study -- a meta-analysis of all available data on clinical trials of SSRIs -- that shows that "compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression" --…
ddobbs | January 17, 2008
I've written before, both here and in print, about how FDA policy and drug company practices have allowed drug makers to publish (and the FDA to base approval on) only the most flattering drug-trial results while keeping less-flattering studies in the drawer. Today a New England Journal of Medicine report shows how things change when you include the results from the drawer: The effectiveness of many SSRIs dives to near placebo-level. This despite that the companies design and conduct most of these trials in a way calculated to produce positive results.
When I wrote on this for Scientific…