In the world of non-randomised studies there are a bucketload of variants, a common one that we see if the ‘before and after study’. This is, on the face of it, a sensible approach. Do your ‘thing’, then change stuff, do the ‘other thing’. Monitor something important you hope to change, and then if it […]
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StatsMiniBlog: Type I and II errors
After reading the title, most people now feel vaguely nauseous. If you throw in alpha and beta, or worse α and β, then there’s a distinctly bilious taste. Don’t get sick, though. Take a deep breath and fall back on what you already know: […]
Moving onwards
Not transition this time, but the whole focus of academia. Do we need to shift the everyday focus of research from universities producing complex lab science to every heath care provider being both an intelligent consumer and local producer of relevant research? For instance: which the following spend the greatest proportion of revenue on R&D […]
Pilgrimage
Photo from Peter Harrison on Flickr Most communities will have one, two, or more campaigns running to raise money for a child with a health concern. It might be a cancer, a chronic disability or a neurodegenerative condition. The campaign is not for a charity which supports children with the condition in general, or research […]
Don’t Forget the Bubbles – new paediatric website
Today saw the launch of Don’t Forget the Bubbles, a new paediatric website. The aim of DFTB is to get more people involved in delivering high quality online education – it’s a collaborative, free, open access (FOAM) resource. The taster content available already gives you an idea of what’s to come. There are useful quick […]
Where does EBM go without E?
I’ve recently been working with lots of folk who manage children with disability and long-term conditions (LTC), a massive group of heterogenously named conditions with sometime similar and sometimes different problems. The teams working with them are passionate and committed and frequently want to use research. Then they go looking for it. […]
StatsMiniBlog: Propensity scores
Propensity scores are used mainly in observational studies assessing treatments as a way of balancing out measured variations in who received a treatment and who didn’t. In most observational studies, there are things which will have pushed the doc into prescribing the medicine in question, or the surgeon to take the knife to that patient […]
August #ADC_JC – depression and chronic fatigue syndrome
August’s #ADC_JC (twitter journal club) was another lively discussion on this paper by Bould et al. The chat has been storified here – have a read to catch up on the discussion. Our next #ADC_JC will be in September (date to be announced). To keep up to date, follow @ADC_JC on twitter or check out […]
StatsMiniBlog: Bootstrapping
As mentioned in previous posts, part of the joys of playing with numbers is in making inferences about how the future will be. This is often why you’re looking for a confidence interval, showing (sort of) where the truth lies with 95% certainty. How you build these CI is interesting. One way is to assume […]
July #ADC_JC – long-term effects antenatal steroids (ASTECS-2)
Our #ADC_JC in July discussed a paper by Stutchfield et al about the long-term consequences of antenatal steroids for elective c-sections (ASTECS-2). We were delighted to have Peter Stutchfield join the chat. Alan Grayson, who was moderating the twitter chat, has put together a storify summarising the discussion and you can view it here. Follow […]