Seen the “98% of studies were ignored!” one doing the rounds on social media. The editorial in the BMJ put it in much better terms:
“One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret.”
You can read the reviews for yourself
https://t.co/82Rjs2L1pA
https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/09/archdischild-2023-326669
Let me know where you find the bit where they dismiss 101 out of 103 papers.
Hint, they didn’t. It is lying to say they dismissed 98% of the studies they looked at.
Read it. Their only inclusion in the report is to half explain why the were discluded, exactly what I said. Most of the dismissals are unscientific, not supported by a statistical analysis of why it was discluded. Data doesn’t become unreliable just because it is incomplete.
That report is absolutely rife with white washing and selection bias, I’d expect a scientific review of trans literature and studies to be a book at this point not 32 pages dismissing 98% of the data. It’s frankly insulting to anyone that’s read or written any number of scientific studies.
They did not dismiss 98% of the data.
Putting 98% of the relevant available data in a supplementary table like 4 is not including the data.
Supplementary Table 4 (from the first review) is a list of each of the 53 studies included in the review and how they were scored based on the Newcastle-Ottawa scale.
The “data” is in supplementary tables 3, 5, 6 and 7. Only studies that were scored as low quality were excluded from the synthesis.
“They dismissed 98% of data” is a lie.
No it’s not. None of the dismissals are statistically/ scientifically supported, and the data they present is blurbed and incompletely presented in a way that isn’t inclusive of what those studies actually say.
Nothing was dismissed at all (and “statistics” has nothing to do with it so curious to mention it).
Studies were scored for quality on the well established Newcastle-Ottawa Score. High and Moderate quality studies were included in the synthesis. Low quality studies were not, but their outcomes are still reported.
Outcomes from each study were included in tables 3, 5, 6 and 7.
'They dismissed 98% of the data" remains a lie.
You can’t remove a study from a scientific paper without having statistical analysis to back it up. Each of those removed studies all had a statistical analysis of how confident they remained in their data even with the gaps. Because there aren’t completed 100% studies in science it just doesn’t happen so you use the data you have and test it for a confidence value you obtain using statistics. And the idea that some trans people don’t make it to the completion of a study due to personal reasons or even suicide isn’t that rare. Not using 98% of the data because of that would be stupid.
You can of course. Statistics are not required to explain why a self selective Facebook poll is low quality while a multi centre 5 year study with followup and compartor is of a much higher quality.
Studies are also scored low on quality if, for example, they don’t control for important sociodemographic confounders. Study that do control these, will have more reliable results.
You can read how the scoring works in supplementary material 1.
“They dismissed 98% of the data” remains a lie. Repeating it doesn’t change anything.