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Re:Rare genital defects seen in sons of men taking major dia... by ImaCake on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @04:55AM (#30840318)
Whatever your opinion on metformin this study is not really providing strong enough evidence to take seriously. No one should give it any attention, except the researchers who will try and do a better one next time and hopefully can prove/disprove this important hypothesis.

The authors have done a lot of tests here. If you do enough tests, even on null data, you eventually get false positive results. Nevermind the effects of confounding which are difficult to control for effectively in a non-random study.

The smallest p-value I could find was P = 0.012. Which is for "elevated birth defect fre- quencies among metformin-exposed offspring". This comes from a table with 6 rows of models with different OR values. Presumably they did have p-values testing if those ORs were statistically different from OR == 1. Which means one should adjust p-values by dividing the significance threshold by 6. So, 0.05/6 = 0.0083 which is smaller than 0.012. So I would be very hesitant to say that the evidence points to metformin really causing this. At least based on this study.

Re:Rare genital defects seen in sons of men taking major dia... by rscho on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @05:47AM (#30840607)
The bonferoni correction is known to be overly restrictive, though. But yes, probably many more models were fit and results are questionable. The author will at least be able to claim a Science paper...

Also, adjustment of the p-value doesn't do anything to solve the flaws of hypothesis testing. But that's another debate entirely.

Re:Rare genital defects seen in sons of men taking major dia... by dhmallon on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @07:23AM (#30841155)
I believe it was published in Annals of Internal Medicine (impact factor of ~4). The link is to a news article in Science discussing the paper.
Re:Rare genital defects seen in sons of men taking major dia... by rscho on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @08:57AM (#30841908)
Ah, then I understand better. Was wondering why such a paper would be in Science.
Re:Rare genital defects seen in sons of men taking major dia... by arijun on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @11:13AM (#30843655)
Relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/882/