Lynn Shaffer's Research Essentials
The essentials for interpreting research and statistics
A colleague brought to my attention a paper recently published in the journal Nature titled, Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time which apparently has generated some buzz. I have been puzzling over it for a little over a week and have decided I shouldn’t spend more time on it. The authors introduce…
Abstract for this post: The article that is the subject of this post was not written by someone who said, “I wonder …” The paper for this review is “Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online.” I’m going to assume this paper was intended to describe a scientific…
A journal club I attend recently reviewed two articles published in Obstetrics & Gynecology (the “Green journal”) that reported rates of preterm delivery during “lockdowns” imposed last year due to the coronavirus epidemic. One of the articles was from Australia and observed a decrease in preterm births. The paper (https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/2021/03000/Prematurity_Rates_During_the_Coronavirus_Disease.3.aspx) examined monthly preterm delivery rates…
A pre-print published online July 1 by the International Journal of Infectious Diseases has invigorated the discussion around hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. This is an analysis of patients treated at Henry Ford Health System in southeast Michigan. Henry Ford is a large and mature health system known for its high quality care. You…
Milk and Health is an article written by Walter Willett, MD, DrPH and David Ludwig, MD, PhD and published in the New England Journal of Medicine (February 2020). Drs. Willett and Ludwig hail from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Both are respected physicians and nutrition researchers. I wouldn’t be surprised if…
My brother recently made me aware of a randomized trial testing whether famotidine (brand name: Pepcid) can prevent bad outcomes in patients with COVID-19. The idea for this came from an infectious disease physician, Michael Callahan, who was working in China when the coronavirus outbreak hit and went to Wuhan to study (?) it. Dr.…
Scroll down to the bottom of this post for the essentials. At last we come to a trial which was published within the last year (October 2019), in the American Journal of Perinatology. The present trial, which I’ll refer to as the “confirmatory trial,” was meant to confirm the results of the Meis trial (see…
Scroll down to the bottom of this post for the essentials. Soon after the da Fonseca trial (Part 1) appeared in the literature, the New England Journal of Medicine published a large randomized clinical trial examining weekly intramuscular injections of 17 alpha-hydroxyprogesterone caproate (17-OHPC) to prevent recurrent preterm delivery. The results of this trial led…
Spoiler alert: not as much as we should at this point. I was going to write a more straightforward post but I was at an ob/gyn journal club a couple of days ago where we discussed a fairly recent article (Oct 2019) reporting on a randomized controlled trial meant to confirm the positive results of…
This site is intended for clinicians and others who are planning a research study or who must evaluate a peer-reviewed scientific article to determine whether it will affect their practice. The focus is to inform on the research methodology and statistical concepts that are relevant to these objectives as efficiently as possible. In other words,…