4 ms·

Well thank you for stats 101 but what I was trying to ask was that if this level of confidence promising within medical/pharma field - i.e. do we have stats on

Well thank you for stats 101 but what I was trying to ask was that if this level of confidence promising within medical/pharma field - i.e. do we have stats on studies that said something like out of the 767 or whatever studies that claimed a drug sounded promising because it was associated with 5% outcome improvement - 90% resulted in long term commercial success of the drug. I mean take Remdesivir - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2007764 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2007764 - statistically significant yet some other studies found it had no benefits. At least I don't think it was a slam dunk or promising in real life as day the vaccines.

SkittyDog 5y ago
It sounds like you're asking "What's the risk that this study will turn out to be wrong, in the long run?" That's a very interesting question, but sadly there's no way to answer it from the available data. Different studies can show different results for a lot of reasons... Sometimes, it's just random chance. Other times, it's due to bad study design, or poor experimental controls, or deliberate P-hacking. There's no way to tell from the results of a single study. But that's not what this study is for, anyway... This is a preliminary observational study to look for possible drug candidates that might impact COVID severity. It's only suggesting potential future directions of investigation, not advocating for immediately dosing everyone with SSRIs... Medical policy changes won't happen until a much larger body of evidence has been established. It's the nature of science that not all experiments produce correct results. Sometimes, we get it wrong--but that's why we have to keep repeating experiments, and trying different variations, before we trust a conclusion. In the meantime, though, medical decision makers will weigh the costs vs benefits of proceeding with an experimental treatment... If the risks are low, and the need is great, they'll probably let the door open to more experiments. Most people seem to think that's a pretty sensible way to do things.

SkittyDog 5y ago

It sounds like you're asking "What's the risk that this study will turn out to be wrong, in the long run?" That's a very interesting question, but sadly there's no way to answer it from the available data. Different studies can show different results for a lot of reasons... Sometimes, it's just random chance. Other times, it's due to bad study design, or poor experimental controls, or deliberate P-hacking. There's no way to tell from the results of a single study. But that's not what this study is for, anyway... This is a preliminary observational study to look for possible drug candidates that might impact COVID severity. It's only suggesting potential future directions of investigation, not advocating for immediately dosing everyone with SSRIs... Medical policy changes won't happen until a much larger body of evidence has been established. It's the nature of science that not all experiments produce correct results. Sometimes, we get it wrong--but that's why we have to keep repeating experiments, and trying different variations, before we trust a conclusion. In the meantime, though, medical decision makers will weigh the costs vs benefits of proceeding with an experimental treatment... If the risks are low, and the need is great, they'll probably let the door open to more experiments. Most people seem to think that's a pretty sensible way to do things.