Anyone here into unlocking potential or harnessing the power of stuff?

Prof John Wright, Director of Born in Bradford @bihr.bsky.social, giving us a warm welcome to Bradford

Personally I just can't get on board with anything that is not a panacea. What's the point? ❌Small effect sizes ❌ Anything multifaceted ❌The Rose Hypothesis ❌"Partial" achievement of learning outcomes in your educational portfolio ❌Results that might be useful as part of a meta analysis No thanks!

The madly insane efforts of reviewers to reject my research are somehow indications of its power

If it's not a panacea, I'm not interested

Let's stop studying things that are not silver bullets. Silver bullets seem much more effective and I think we should focus on those

See if you can figure out this note to an NHS press release, explaining what it means when there is no statistical evidence of a difference between two numbers - www.england.nhs.uk/2023/11/one-...

Ranked list of "things" most feared by Catholic high school boys in Maryland, 1939. Rank (prevalence). www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Given that trails recruit participants with different baseline risk, eg. because participants in one trail are older than those in another, does it make sense to pool relative effect sizes in meta analysis?

Me before revising the manuscript: WTF. I hate doing this. Me after revising the manuscript: Well, that was pleasantly easy. Nice work. Actually better than before.

Among people who use heroin, tobacco smoking and illegal drugs cause a similar number of premature deaths buff.ly/tIC0Fqp @danlewer.bsky.social @tattanbirch.bsky.social @sharoncox.bsky.social

New episode of Money Power Health with the wonderful Dr Nicola Dennis and Dr Chantal Edge on prisons, justice and health in the UK: open.spotify.com/episode/48Cg... Ad free on Apple, spotify. @uoe-sps.bsky.social @lhgp.bsky.social @adphuk.bsky.social @ukhsa.bsky.social @healthfoundation.bsky.social

The appropriate technical term is bullshit

The truth is that what leads you astray is not the model, it's staring at tables of model coefficients to figure out what your research question was.

Tobacco smoking & illegal drugs each appear to account for ~ 1/4 of premature deaths among people who use heroin. Smoking also exacerbates their poverty which makes quitting heroin even harder. Also reduces treatment outcomes onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We did some life table modelling among people who use heroin. Tobacco smoking causes as many premature deaths in this group as illegal drugs. Yet public health policies overlook smoking: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... New research with @sharoncox.bsky.social @tattanbirch.bsky.social

when this shows up at like 70min I had to pause the video and go show my wife that bayesians are mainstream now

Omg I'm in my own meme

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? On the whole, screening people for asymptomatic diseases is harmful

"Dear Academic. Would you like to spend a year putting together a special issue for our journal? You will provide us with all your contacts and edit the issue for us for free. We will then sell access to the work. In return for your efforts, you will be allowed to read the issue, for no extra cost".

"I asked ChatGPT"

We've just published a scoping review of projects that aim to improve opioid agonist therapy (eg. methadone) in acute hospital settings: journals.plos.org/mentalhealth.... This is part of our excellent iHOST project (www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/cen...). A couple of findings ...

I beg you please stop calling p-hacking exploratory analysis. Call it data dredging, fishing expedition, cherry picking, significance chasing. Labeling your non-pre-reg'd analyses clearly as exploratory isn't a license to p-hack. Stop bastardizing scientific exploration and stop hiding behind it.

Been puzzling over the concept of "positive deviance" for about 10 years now

I love you @plos.org but you're literally emailing me to ask me to change the word "Figure" to "Fig" so you don't have to

"We used a Cox model on a massive dataset and found evidence that hazards were not proportional over time (p < 0.05). So we added several time-varying parameters and that seemed to solve the problem (p > 0.05)"

If a health researcher describes their study as "population-based", what does this mean to you?

Before citing a paper the least you can do is thoroughly read… 1st year student: the entire literature on the subject Grad student: the paper you cite Post-grad: title and abstract and scan the rest of the paper Professor: the title. PLEASE read the title

In this new article in The Lancet Regional Health (Western Pacific) we use repeated cross sectional data to estimate the number of people initiating injection of methamphetamine and other drugs over time. The number has dropped dramatically since the 90s. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Overdiagnosis of mental disorders is making headlines again, this time thanks to Wes Streeting. But it is true? (thread) www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

AI is going to replace statisticians. AI:

We spend 13x as much on MDPI than we do on PLOS

I don't know anything except the one specific thing I've recently finished studying. Please don't ask me about anything else

Can we please stop searching for biomarkers of aging? We don't need them. It's quite easy to identify people at higher risk of early death. What we need is to invest in simple, boring, cost effective ways to help prevent illness. I.e. public health and primary care.

I'm delighted to say our highly secure and productive OpenSAFELY platform has received a further £17 million in funding from Wellcome, including for a new mental health data project. More here, and clips from Today on Radio4 this morning too! www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/02...

The only function of conference posters is to prop up the conference business model

In science, the fact no one has done something before is a good reason to question whether that thing is really a good idea.

So many people have a visceral reaction to pie charts. Is it really just that the segments can be a bit harder to compare than in a bar chart? Why are you so passionately against pie charts? Look inside yourself, what have pie charts done to you?

✨ ✨ WE ARE HIRING! ✨ ✨ We need two new Senior Research Fellows! Have you: 🟢 Experience in statistical and epidemiological analysis 🔵 Used quasi-experimental methods 🟢 An understanding of epidemiological methods Then we need you! borninbradford.nhs.uk/careers/seni...

Is it possible to calculate a p-value for a p-value? Like the effect was significant at the level of p < 0.05 (p < 0.05)

Please expand the scope of your research including data you didn't collect while reducing word count

I do research into health inequalities. People often say "when are we going to stop describing the problem and do something about it?" In answer to the first part of the question, I'm not going to stop describing the problem.

Tapping the sign

www.bmj.com/content/308/... From 30 years ago …

I'm starting to think that interrupted time series in a single population (however large) are not strong designs, as they're so sensitive to modelling decisions, eg.slope/step changes, how you treat seasonality, etc. For better evidence you need an intervention rolled out across multiple populations

For anyone excited about research using AI and NHS data, how is AI going to help with: - Research questions? - Confounding? - Collider bias? - Immortal time? - Estimands? - Data protection? - Uncertainty? - Generalisability? - Measurement? - Missing data? - Triangulation? - PPI?

Today’s plan MAINLINES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE INTO THE VEINS of this enterprising nation www.gov.uk/government/n...

Published estimates suggesting a survival advantage from giving polyclonal intravenous immunoglobulin in streptococcal toxic shock syndrome are explained, at least in part, by immortal time bias