Posts filed under General (3152)

It hasn’t yet reached the NZ media yet, but there’s another claimed Alzheimer’s treatment out there.  Vox and Quartz have good pieces on it.

A company called Biogen is studying a compound called BAN2401, and presented results at a major scientific conference.   Like a lot of robustly unsuccessful treatments, BAN2401 attempts to remove amyloid protein before it can form plaques. However, in a Phase II (small) trial people getting BAN2401 had slower decline in cognitive symptoms than people getting placebo.

Lots of potential drugs appear successful in Phase II trials but end up washing out in larger (‘phase III’) trials. On the other hand, the results for BAN2401 are unusually promising for an Alzheimer’s treatment — mostly, these get headlines based just on biochemical improvements, not actual patient-visible benefits.

Based on the history of clinical trials, the odds that BAN2401 will really turn out useful can’t be any higher than even money.  But, for a change, they might not be all that much lower, either.

Update: actually, it appears that the placebo group randomly ended up with more patients having the main genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s, APOE4, so that’s another reason to be less hopeful about the results being confirmed

The Herald has a headline: Babies die after their mothers took Viagra while pregnant during a medical trial.  The story is pretty informative, even though its only cited source is the Daily Mail, but there are a few things that are missing.

First, the death rates in this Amsterdam study sound huge. They are. This is a study in pregnancies with extremely poor expected outcomes. Eleven deaths are potentially attributed to the treatment; there are a further 17 deaths from other causes, split about equally between the treatment and control groups.

Second, there are two other studies mentioned, in the UK and Canada.  These are actually part of a pre-planned group of trials, since no single country has enough of these high-risk pregnancies to do the study on its own.  The UK study didn’t see any excess risk, and while we don’t know the results of the Canadian study yet, if it had seen a huge excess risk it would presumably have already stopped, too.

One other major study from this group isn’t mentioned. There’s an Australia/NZ study, which saw slightly better outcomes in the group getting Viagra. It hasn’t been formally published yet, but the results were presented to a conference and were reported in the Herald earlier this year.  It looks as though something might have been different about the Amsterdam study — although it’s also possible they were extremely unlucky.

The other important piece of context, which is in a story in the Guardian, is that Viagra treatment was already being chosen by some women and their doctors in  the hope it would help, but without any convincing information on safety or effectiveness.   A trial that shows a treatment is ineffective or harmful is a bad result for people in the trial, but it should still save lives in the future.

Q: Did you see mobile phones cause cancer again?

A: The story from the Observer?

Q: No, the Otago Daily Times.

A: It’s the same story, they just don’t say where they got it.

Q: So there’s peer-reviewed evidence that mobile phones are giving us cancer?

A: No.

Q: They say there is

A: They almost do say that, yes.  There’s peer-reviewed evidence that sufficiently high doses of phone-frequency radio waves cause cancer in mice — though the microwaved mice actually lived longer. However, there’s also peer–reviewed evidence that mobile phones do not increase the risk of cancer much if at all in people.  For example, brain cancers in people haven’t gotten more common except due to the population being older. 

Q: Don’t you have a vested interest in this, though?

A: Huh?

Q: Well, the anti-phone story says no-one should trust any research with any commercial involvement.

A: Um, yes?

Q: And the only sensible policy in that case is to spend a lot more public money on academic medical research, which is good for you.

A: I… suppose

Q: And you don’t like phone calls.

A: But phone calls aren’t even what people use phones for nowadays.

Q: So maybe that’s why phones aren’t causing brain cancer.

A:  Sigh. Ok, go read the detailed response that the Observer published.

Q: Is that in the Otago Daily Times too?

A: Not so far.  I’m sure they’ll get to it.

• “More than 4,100 Illinois children were assigned a 90 percent or greater probability of death or injury, according to internal DCFS child-tracking data released to the Tribune under state public records laws.”  A data-mining program designed to predict child abuse wasn’t very good.
• Dropbox gave out (‘anonymised’) data to researchers studying collaboration — their current terms of service allow this, but the terms of service from 2015, the start of the data, didn’t. 
• From the Creepy and possibly Evil department: a Pro Publica/NPR report on use of non-traditional data sources (social media, shopping, TV-watching) by health insurers.
• “Clinicians order portable x-rays because a patient is too sick to get out of bed. This practice is consistent across hospitals. The example images above suggest that CNNs may be able to learn to identify patients who received portable x-rays and assign higher rates of disease to them. Identifying portable x-rays as more likely to contain pneumonia, therefore, would likely generalize across hospitals. The portable x-ray, however, is not the cause of pneumonia.”  A post on difficulties in teaching machines to read chest x-rays.
• Tim Dare, an ethicist from the University of Auckland, gave his Professorial Inaugural Lecture on transparency in computer algorithms. Here’s a post at Newsroom.

Team Ratings for the Semi-finals

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 124 matches played, 88 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 71%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for the Semi-finals

Here are the predictions for the Semi-finals. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 20

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 144 matches played, 88 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 61.1%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 20

Here are the predictions for Round 20. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for the Qualifiers

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 120 matches played, 84 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 70%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for the Qualifiers

Here are the predictions for the Qualifiers. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 19

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 136 matches played, 81 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 59.6%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 19

Here are the predictions for Round 19. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 19

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 113 matches played, 78 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 69%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 19

Here are the predictions for Round 19. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 18

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 128 matches played, 77 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 60.2%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 18

Here are the predictions for Round 18. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.