The Charlson Comorbidity Index is based on a single study of 559 patients at one NYC hospital in 1987. That’s why HIV is six times worse than diabetes. Two questions: 1) why do scientists not check their sources? 2) why are we still using this?
Andrew Vickers
3,369 posts
Andrew Vickers
@VickersBiostats
Biostatistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Special interest in prostate cancer, risk prediction, patient-reported outcomes, decision-making.
- Statistics education should abandon teaching of computation (eg calculate z from the data) and focus exclusively on conceptual issues (eg inference vs. estimation; what are multivariable models?) and how to interpret statistical results (eg p=.063, conclude what?). Discuss.
- I am studying informed consent for clinical trials, wanting to see how we can simplify this process for patients. We give a brief questionnaire asking about their consent experience. But I have to first give patients a consent form that is 10 pages long.
- This is the normal Ioannidis thing about research being terrible. The article has a fatal flaw though: he says we shouldn't take a certain action without good evidence, but NOT taking that action is also a decision that requires evidence.A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data Op-ed in @statnews by John Ioannidis @METRICStanford statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-f…
- I generally dislike papers whining how about bad published research is, but this is important. Machine learning in medicine seems to exist well outside of the mainstream of established methods: ~90% internal validation only, ~95% ignore calibration. linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S…
- Generic statistician type of moan: Please stop using Bonferroni correction when testing a limited number of correlated hypotheses (eg is there an effect on anxiety? what about depression?). I know it makes y'all feel very statistically rigorous but it is unhelpful and invalid.
- Picture on the left: my son Robin Vickers Batzdorf at age 14, with his frisbee hero,Harper Garvey. Picture on the right: a few days ago, Robin and Harper having just played against each other in the semifinals of the national championship. @RevolverIHD @PrideofNY
- I guess I should retweet my own quote...
- I asked the editor of a medical journal out on a date. She said no, but told me I could transfer the date request to her sister, who would charge $3,500 if she accepted.
- Big news! decisioncurveanalysis.org has been completely updated and revamped. Code, tutorials, guides, bibliographies, videos and more! Amazing job by @ShaunPorwal @statistishdan
- Prediction modelers: please be like @ashclift @JuliaHCox @GSCollins & write papers like bmj.com/content/381/bm…. Large data set, careful evaluation of different modeling approaches, evaluation of calibration (which appears not to exist in ML world), decision curve analysis
- Proposal: clinical journals should replace the "conclusion" section of abstracts with "Implications for Clinical Practice" and "Implications for Research". One key point: Perfectly fine to have "implications for Clinical Practice" be "None".
- Surgeon: Surgery better than radiation? Great paper! Radiation oncologist: Radiation worse than surgery? Paper is trash! Methodologist: the study was well done, though more exploration of residual confounding would be of benefit. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
- There is no statistical solution to the problem of causal inference from observational data, it requires good scientific & statistical judgement, & knowledge of the literature. Folks like short cuts (propensity scores, E values etc) to avoid hard thinking. Short cuts don’t exist.
