Excited to have @mpiccininni3 speaking at the @turinginst causal inference interest group about whether cognitive screening tests should be corrected for age and education

#CIIG #EpiTwitter #CausalTwitter Marco explains it is fairly standard, when performing cognitive screening tests, to 'correct' (or standardise) the result for demographic characteristics (e.g. age and level of education). The resulting score tells you someone's result for people of similar age & education

Why do nutrition studies disagree about the effects of food on health?

New paper by @GeorgiaTomova in @AJCNutrition suggests it may be due to routine adjustment for total energy, which can produce misleading results if not used with care!
doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/n…
1/12 #EpiTwitter Many nutrition studies are interested in substitution effects.

Substitution effects are the effect of SWAPPING a particular nutrient or food with one or more other nutrients or foods while keeping the total energy (or mass) the same.

doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/n…
2/12 #EpiTwitter

Excited to share exchange with Willett, Stampfer, & @deirdre_tobias published in @AJCNutrition. Hopefully interesting to all in nutrition Epi!

Paper: academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/1…

Willet et al: academic.oup.com/ajcn/advance-a…

@GeorgiaTomova et al: academic.oup.com/ajcn/advance-a…

1/12
#EpiTwitter Our paper examined common approaches to adjusting for energy intake using a causal framework. Willet et al raised 4 points of disagreement with our conclusions.

I'll try to summarise with our responses. Beware, it jumps straight into technical details!

2/12 cc @GeorgiaTomova

Our new study confirms the tragic consequences of delaying the UK's first lockdown.

If it started 1 week earlier, there would have been 20k-35k fewer deaths. The required duration, for the same exit incidence, would also have halved from 69 to 35 days
1/6
journals.plos.org/plosone/articl… The UK experienced one of the highest per-capita death tolls during the first #Covid19 wave.

It has been fiercely debated whether this was partly due to the UK government's relatively slow initiation of lockdown measures.

2/6
journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

Most people don't realise that academic science is a very long way from healthy.

In fact, all good academic scientists must, at some point, go through a reckoning. When they awaken from the 'dream of science' to realise just how broken things are.

🧵 1/11
#ScienceInCrisis My own crisis happened during my PhD. It was gradual, but at some point I realised academic science wasn't driven by truth, quality, or collectivism, but ego, opportunism, and exploitation. I couldn't believe it. It seemed so wrong and unfair.

2/11
#ScienceInCrisis

A thread on our study in @BJOGTweets, which uses a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the separate effects of fasting plasma glucose and diagnosis of gestational diabetes in women screened during pregnancy
/1
#EpiTwitter

https://twitter.com/PWGTennant/status/1438526723604324356

There's a lot of debate surrounding the screening and treatment of pregnant women for gestational diabetes.

In most existing research, women with gestational diabetes have only modestly increased risks of adverse outcomes, such as large-for-gestational-age.

2/
#EpiTwitter

It's worrying for a new NICE guidance to be delayed and undermined on the grounds it doesn't match 'clinical experience'.

If the scientific evidence always matched 'clinical experience', there'd be no point to research or evidence based medicine... 🤔

#EBM #EpiTwitter

https://twitter.com/RobertHMcMullen/status/1428375470731636738

If 'evidence based medicine' is working there should be REGULAR occasions when the 'evidence' not only disagrees with 'clinical experience' but actively contradicts it.

Wherever 'clinical experience' is allowed to overrule 'scientific evidence', we return to quackery.