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Egg Intake and the Incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease in the Adventist Health Study-2 Cohort Linked with Medicare Data
Via StudyFinds:
Eating Eggs Regularly May Significantly Slash Alzheimer’s Risk
https://studyfinds.com/eating-eggs-regularly-may-significant...
They give the data for the specific factors. What is the missing variable which explains their result?
Daily hours of sunlight? Average number of sudoku completions per day?
This isn't that complicated. Observational studies just have these weaknesses. We're past the point of observation here, as I said, and it's time to try intervention testing.
The study wasn't about veganism so it isn't as useful as other finer-grained dietary patterns or intake variables which they account for.
> Funding [...] The analyses in this study were supported by an investigator-initiated grant from the American Egg Board. [...]
[The Simpsons] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHAFMFFQlkI https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Egg_Council_Guy
Almost everything we have in modern medicine is.
This whole position is nonsense. The paper stands on its own.
Which is not true in this case.
For better and sometimes worse, the process through which medical drugs and procedures come to market, including studies and trials, is heavily regulated.
The Egg Board, however, is free to choose whichever studies to fund they prefer, and will gravitate to ones likely to show the positive effects of eggs and avoid ones likely to show the opposite.
The content of the paper may be entirely legitimate, but it still actually tells us nothing about whether we should eat more eggs or not.
So it's 'science' done wrong. The implications are that most drugs are useless if not outright harmful.
There's two way to bias independent research through funding. The most nefarious is to fund a whole bunch of research, and only publish the favored results. By ignoring enough failed attempts, it's even possible to get false-positive successes, through random chance. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/)
The second way is to only fund research that is likely to be favorable. E.g. if you sell vitamin supplements, you only fund research on people with bad diets, but not people who eat healthy diets that likely aren't affected by supplements.
In this case, it's leaning so far into the latter, that it's just pointing out positive research that someone else found.
From the actual study, which is free to read [0]:
>Dietary intake was assessed at baseline using a validated, self-administered FFQ that included >200 food items
So out of 200 potential associations, eggs were the winner? See this famous xkcd: Green jelly beans linked to acne.[1]
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002231662...
[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/882:_Significant
Usually bearable (~10 seconds wait and usually requires click), but some sites have a short expiry. Means you get hit with the check repeatedly while browsing the same site, which is more annoying than the initial check itself.