pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

People say things like “depression causes alcohol use disorder and alcohol use disorder causes depression” all the time. CLDs depict the conceptual idea easily. I agree that they lack the precision of meaning that DAGs have about effects of well-defined exposures/outcomes.

Mapping complex public health problems with causal loop diagrams Abstract. This paper presents causal loop diagrams (CLDs) as tools for studying complex public health problems like health inequality. These problems often

Bidirectional causation looks bidirectional on a causal loop diagram that doesn’t have time-specific nodes (academic.oup.com/ije/article/...).

With @akregan.bsky.social and @oacarah.bsky.social

Assessing the Use of Medical Insurance Claims and Electronic Health Records to Measure COVID-19 Vaccination During Pregnancy - Drug Safety Introduction The safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy are commonly assessed using administrative health records, which may misclassify vaccine exposures. Objective The aim...

How well do electronic health records and health insurance claims capture COVID-19 vaccine doses in the US? And how does measurement error impact estimates of vaccine safety and effectiveness in studies using these data sources?

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A less cynical take might be that in team science, there is value added from people who focus on working with particular types of data because they better understand dataset-specific issues with measurement, selection, etc. But I also agree with what you and @pwgtennant.bsky.social say below.

Re. Prediagnostic Exposures and Cancer Survival: Can a Meaningful Causal Estimand be Specified?

…research questions and estimands should concur on and be explicit about the target population(s)

#Causalinference #CausalSky #CausalEstimands #TargetPopulation #EpiSky

journals.lww.com/epidem/fullt...

Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?” Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?”

Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Making DAGs even more useful: using augmented causal diagrams to depict counterfactual, study design, measurement, analytical, and interventional features Since their mainstream introduction in the 1990s, causal diagrams, including directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), have been increasingly used to depict our caus

New paper for #causalinference folks in all fields

#DAGs

#CausalDiagrams

#CausalSky #StatsSky #EpiSky

academic.oup.com/ije/article/...

Great to see this paper!

You have probably already noted this, but is Fig 2B supposed to be labeled about pregnancies instead of infants?

Risk of Severe Maternal Morbidity Associated With Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Infection During Pregnancy Pregnant people are at greater risk of severe COVID-19 illness. Results from a national cohort study of 93,624 deliveries indicate that SARS-CoV-2 infectio

academic.oup.com/ofid/article...

#PublicHealth #EpiSky #COVID19 #Pregnancy

“COVID-19 vaccination during early pregnancy is not associated with an increased prevalence of major structural birth defects in infants. These results SUPPORT THE SAFETY OF COVID-19 VACCINATION in early pregnancy.”

publications.aap.org/pediatrics/a...

#PublicHealth #COVID19vaccineSafe #Pregnancy

New preprint finding that eliminating US global health funding over the next fifteen years would cause:
- 15.2m deaths from AIDS
- 2.2m deaths from TB
- 7.9 additional child deaths

An image with a prescription pill bottle. Text on the image reads: 99% of all new medications resulted from federally-funded university research through NIH

Did you know? 99% of all new medications resulted from federally-funded university research through #NIH

Learn more about #ResearchSavesLives: hub.jhu.edu/research-sav....

Is the planet losing one of its best ways to slow climate change? The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose last year at the fastest rate on record. The spike has scientists worried that more and more carbon is coming from natural sources.

The proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere grew at a record 3.75 ppm last year -- a jump 27% bigger than the previous record increase.

The best explanation: forests and soils are so stressed by climate change they're losing the ability to absorb our emissions.
www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.

Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

A modern miracle made possible through NIH funding of research both intramurally and through the national network of academic research centers