Turns out lowly thymus may be saving your life

Re:Turns out lowly thymus may be saving your life by mlyle on Thursday August 10, 2023 @04:44PM (#37081536)

This is a research question you can't answer with a prospective analysis either, because it's not ethical in most cases to randomize whether you're removing a body part.

The best we're going to do is a careful case control study (and research in animal models). And the evidence is enough to imply strongly that we should expend a little more effort to avoid removing the thymus.

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Re:Turns out lowly thymus may be saving your life by Calavar on Thursday August 10, 2023 @04:49PM (#37081588)

> This is a research question you can't answer with a prospective analysis either, because it's not ethical to randomize whether you're removing a body part.

But that's exactly what we did with the appendix, multiple times [1, 2].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26080338/

[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2014320

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Re:Turns out lowly thymus may be saving your life by mlyle on Thursday August 10, 2023 @04:50PM (#37081612)

I had thought about this and had amended this to "in most cases" before you posted.

If the standard of care is removing the appendix, and you have a strong reason to believe that something less may be superior, you may be able to conduct a randomized trial.

But any other combination of facts is going to be hard for an IRB to swallow.

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