Share this page!

Health Nerd Profile picture
Twitter logo
4 Mar, 5 tweets, 2 min read
The first large, well-done RCT on ivermectin for mild COVID-19 has been published, and has found no benefit for the drug

jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…
Also, this was a beautiful thing to see while reading the study. "We made a mistake at the start so we fixed it but here's all the data so you can tell for yourself" is absolutely the right thing to do when reporting on your trial outcomes!
I suspect when I do a formal risk of bias score for the study it will come out looking fantastic simply from this one thing. Researchers who are entirely open about their methods are the ones who publish the best studies!
Sorry, wrong screenshot above. This is where they are honest about the research issues
Seriously, there are so many studies that just exclude data like this and never report mistakes, or do so in a thoroughly opaque way. This is a breath of fresh air, and makes me trust the study far more

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Health Nerd

Health Nerd Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
5 Mar
A fascinating paper on COVID-19 death underreporting in Zambia. Of 364 people tested after death:

- 6 officially recorded as a COVID-19 death
- 70 tested positive to COVID-19 on PCR

Implies ~90%(!) underreporting of COVID-19 burden

bmj.com/content/372/bm…
In patients where a clinical cause was able to be identified, the vast majority of cases were clearly deaths caused by COVID-19, which means that this is likely a true undercount of the deaths
Worryingly, only 1 in 7 of the children who died of COVID-19 had been tested for it beforehand
Read 7 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
3 Mar
The largest/only RCT of microdosing psilocybin (shrooms) for mental health has just come out, and it found no benefit

It is also one of the most methodologically beautiful pieces of research I have ever seen. Amazing innovation

elifesciences.org/articles/62878…
Doing research on shrooms is hard, because they're mostly illegal and there are a lot of restrictions in most places

Much of the research is simply observational, asking people who already take shrooms what they think of the experience
So what did the researchers do?

They asked people who were already going to microdose shrooms to BLIND AND RANDOMIZE THEMSELVES

Super cool idea, and impressively sound methodology ImageImage
Read 10 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
2 Mar
This appears to be a pretty straightforward case of p-hacking as described, except in the opposite direction - the authors kept hunting around until they found a NON significant relationship to put in the paper Image
Of course, the research letter that this is about, because it suggested that Swedish schoolchildren/teachers were totally safe from COVID-19, has been in dozens of news articles and has an Altmetric of 6,500 🙄
It sounds like the only reasonable course of action for @NEJM at this point is to place a notification of concern on the paper and investigate themselves
Read 7 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
26 Feb
There's been a lot of discussion recently about preprints and how we should interpret them as evidence

A few thoughts from my perspective as an epidemiologist and science communicator 1/7
2/7 The basic idea of preprints was originally twofold:

1. Put your research in the public domain, get feedback before publication
2. Get research up while it works its way through months/years of peer review
3/7 During the pandemic, given the absurd reality of months+ for studies to be peer-reviewed, preprints have become one of the primary ways for us to see new science

Imo there are pros and cons here
Read 7 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
25 Feb
Some fascinating new data on 2020 deaths in Australia from @ABSStats:

- no excess mortality
- a modest (-0.8%) DECREASE in deaths
- biggest driver of the decrease is the massive (-37%) reduction in flu deaths

abs.gov.au/statistics/hea…
Pretty amazing that, despite the spike in COVID-19 deaths from the Victorian outbreak, there was ~no~ excess mortality during winter because the number of deaths directly attributable to influenza fell from a yearly average of ~900 to 42
Also interesting - despite lockdowns and restrictions, at worst only very minor increases in deaths due to diabetes, cancer, or CVD, and a modest reduction in deaths due to COPD (probably flu related)
Read 5 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
23 Feb
As an interesting note on this, the last time I contacted an author/editor to point out a study had mathematical errors, I was dismissed by the editor and insulted by the author
Conversely, I've had some really excellent discussions on Twitter about research, people are often happy to engage. Is this unprofessional?
Another important point to think about @apsmunro is that formal channels to critique research take at least months, and can easily stretch to years. The challenge with the status quo is that it often results in no action even for obvious mistakes
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @GidMK has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @GidMK!

Read all threads by @GidMK