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An example of simply awful research that is going to be widely publicised nevertheless.
Thread - what's wrong with this research? https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54951648
Thread - what's wrong with this research? https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54951648
The headline conclusion is clear - most people who complain of side effects from taking statins are experiencing psychosomatic issues.
If you had a hypothesis - "I think that most of these side effects aren't real" - how would you normally approach testing it?
2/n
If you had a hypothesis - "I think that most of these side effects aren't real" - how would you normally approach testing it?
2/n
Well you'd have two groups of patients, to one you'd give the statins, to the other the placebo, and you'd look for differences between the two groups. Was that done here? No - what happened instead was pretty unusual.
3/n
3/n
They took people who had already come off statins due to side-effects - a group who are now going to fear going back on the pill, and gave them a mixture of dummy pills and statins for a year and found that there was little difference between the dummy pill and the statins.
4/n
4/n
From this what you can conclude is that patients who fear side-effects in statins because they've had them before, are liable to experience a nocebo effect.
What you CANNOT conclude is that someone NEW to statins would have the same reaction, and yet that's what they do here.
5/n
What you CANNOT conclude is that someone NEW to statins would have the same reaction, and yet that's what they do here.
5/n
When you come off a drug due to side effects, there is substantial fear involved in taking it again. Nobody wants to take something they "know" makes them ill.
Reading about side effects associated with a drug you've never taken will not have anything like the same impact.
6/n
Reading about side effects associated with a drug you've never taken will not have anything like the same impact.
6/n
I can't help feeling that the study was purposefully designed to give this false conclusion - what is truly bad here though is that it isn't being challenged.
7/n
7/n
Note - I don't know if these side-effects are real or not - I'm just stating that THIS research doesn't come close to supporting the conclusion made - and given that it would be easy to perform research that DID properly establish the facts...
8/n
8/n
one has to question why they did it this way.
But overall, it's yet another example of why the UK media should NOT EVER report on research that hasn't been properly peer-reviewed first, so if peer review throws up issues, those can be addressed.
But overall, it's yet another example of why the UK media should NOT EVER report on research that hasn't been properly peer-reviewed first, so if peer review throws up issues, those can be addressed.
