We are proud to feature 2025 RCCN Pilot Awardees David Allison and Colby Vorland in this Pilot Awardee Spotlight! Learn more about their Inter-NIA Center pilot project here: bit.ly/4pvWAEb #Geroscience #Statistics #AgingResearch @colbyvorland.bsky.social

Credit to MDPI for retracting this vitamin D/COVID-19 meta-analysis that @gidmk.bsky.social and I flagged: pubpeer.com/publications...

Some interesting PubPeer comments on "Efficacy of oral folinic acid supplementation in children with autism spectrum disorder: a randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial" pubpeer.com/publications...

No, glucose monitors aren't particularly helpful for people who don't have diabetes or pre-diabetes. Pathologizing insulin spikes is yet another distraction from the reality of an untenable food environment. www.washingtonpost.com/food/2025/09...

My new piece is on the painfully slow process of scientific error-correction and how it harms real people all the time. Also, why cinnamon probably isn't a useful treatment for diabetes. gidmk.substack.com/p/cinnamon-f...

Saddened to hear of the passing of Drummond Rennie, a quite influential figure. retractionwatch.com/2025/09/15/d...

Amazing meeting, already looking forward to the next one!

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... INSPECT-SR: A tool for assessing trustworthiness of randomised controlled trials.

A new expression of concern was published on this randomized clinical trial of cinnamon for diabetes. The study itself has been cited, according to Google, 1,700 times. I first complained about it in 2023, so let me tell you the story of one of the most problematic papers I've come across 1/n

Another Asemi paper retracted (retractionwatch.com/2020/11/10/j...)

"Science becomes trustworthy by constantly questioning itself" journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... by @briannosek.bsky.social

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

The PRC program is now online! Using #GPT to Identify Changes in RCT Outcomes Registered on ClinicalTrials.gov from @ischoolui.bsky.social @colbyvorland.bsky.social is part of Day 3’s 'Use of #AI to Assess Quality & Reporting’ session Register at peerreviewcongress.org#GPT#AI @jama.com @bmj.com

A brief guide to statistical analysis of grouped data in preclinical research rdcu.be/er3HG

ScienceGuardians is a platform describing itself as the "first fully verified journal club" dedicated to fighting the "PubPeer Network Mob". They boast of a stringent verification process. On a whim, I registered an account for Larry Richardson, my grandma's cat. It was approved in 2 hours.

Join us this summer at our meeting "Statistical Methods, Developments, and Challenges in Geroscience": training.publichealth.indiana.edu/campaign/ger... scholarships available to support attendance!

puppy scans 😂

Happy CONSORT update day www.bmj.com/content/389/...

Our letter: "No compelling evidence of sex differences in brain maturation during COVID-19 lockdowns when the sexes are compared statistically" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

When Scientists Don’t Correct Errors, Misinformation and Deadly Consequences Can Follow, we write in @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/when...

Nutrition's shaky foundations ggck2.substack.com/p/nutritions...

Preprint: Improving Statistical Rigor in Animal Aging Research by Addressing Clustering and Nesting Effects: Illustration with the National Institute on Aging’s Intervention Testing Program Data www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1. EXCLUSIVE: Major anti-vaccine and alternative health influencer Dr. Joe Mercola says he wants people to march with weapons on veterinarians, and this is just the tip of the iceberg of what I discovered. youtu.be/QRps3VQ-0BE

We annotated 100 RCT protocol/results pairs per SPIRIT and CONSORT reporting guidelines, trained NLP models on the annotations to identify relevant text, and made our dataset, models, and code available: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Possibly our last short course on obesity and causal inference, held in Birmingham AL this summer- info and application here: training.publichealth.indiana.edu/shortcourses...

Wow, super generous of @elisabethbik.bsky.social

An army of medical contrarians and wellness quacks to take over our health systems. What could go wrong.

"If one group weaponizes retractions to delegitimize studies they find problematic, why shouldn’t another?" Our Ivan Oransky speaks with Alice Dreger of Heterodox Academy

Investigating fraud and errors in health research is obviously laudable. But we need to maintain high methodological standards. That means scrutinising each others’ work, and calling each other out when we err. There are so many errors in error detection. A few recurring errors:

National Science Foundation "is planning to lay off between a quarter and a half of its staff in the next two months," Politico reports. www.politico.com/news/2025/02...

We shared code and outputs on GitHub, but a journal told us: "GitHub unfortunately does not meet our data sharing requirements. Please revert to using the OSF, or a similar suitable repository." ... what??

At least AI will be able to easily fetch us all these absurd AI claims in 5 to 10 years so we can laugh about them.

We've had a paper reviewed by ERROR, which has concluded we had a "major error that affects a core conclusion" Few comments on the conclusion and the process in general 1/n

"We’d urge publishers that have yet to adopt this approach to embrace transparency. The scientific record should reflect what actually happened, not a sanitised narrative that leaves out the messy bits." Amen.

Opened a systematic review of 'RCTs' on creatine and memory, checked the study with the largest reported effect size, and it is clearly not randomized. 🙄

Cool and rare opportunity

"The main finding of this review is a 70% inaccuracy rate in citing an original research article related to food fortification with folic acid." www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/16...

Some more detailed thoughts, and a plea to basic science #metabolism folks to collaborate with #nutrition scientists/RDs: open.substack.com/pub/kcklatt/...

We had a blind taste test of various colas for our holiday party, the winner only got 4 of 7 correct, most of us only got 3

HA "That sounds bad. But 60 times 7,000 is not 42,000. It is 420,000. This is what Joe Schwarcz noticed. The estimated exposure is not even a tenth of the reference dose. That does not sound as bad." On black plastic spatulas, and scientific mistakes nationalpost.com/news/canada/...

Oh.

When this is polished it will be very useful for metascience projects... e.g., ask it to go retrieve a bunch of journal data sharing policies and put them in a csv

It took 3.5 years for one we reported to Hindawi's research integrity team to be retracted, after about 40 emails to them... statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/04/12/d...

"And today’s random (and dubious) medical news is: dark chocolate prevents diabetes" ieureka.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/12/04/d...

"A marked increase of health-related fraudulent ads leveraging AI-generated images, videos and audio promoting various supplements on Meta’s social platforms: Facebook, Messenger and Instagram" www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/l...

Funding available to do a PhD on statistical methods for assessing the integrity of RCTs, based in Aberdeen, with Alison Avenell, myself, Graeme MacLennan and Mark Bolland. Competitive process, funded by MRC Trials Methodology Research Partnership: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Contractually obligated as a nutrition scientist to post this gif today

"Blue zones, supposed havens of longevity, have become a global brand. But skeptics think they rest on shaky science" www.science.org/content/arti...

Surgeon general nominee. Sigh.