Regards.

Sorry, can’t remember which company it was, since I received them quite a few months ago.

The accompanying literature was of the “Evidence/research shows” and how beneficial they would be.

If I receive anymore, I’ll let you know…

http://www.fabresearch.org/view_item.aspx?item_id=1019

*bed*

Hang on – isn’t Sedgefield part of County Durham?

…and isn’t the Rt Hon Tony Blair PM, MP for Sedgefield?

I make a ridiculous hypothesis for the Daily Mail Health Section that it must be something in the drinking water. that prevents a rationale and objective response to questions asked …..

“September 17, 2006 at 3:04 pm

As leading author on the Oxford-Durham study (Pediatrics 115 (5) 1360-1366), I’ve tried to stand back from this debate – but for the benefit of #98 and #105, I must make clear that:

1) Durham LEA have all the data collected for our trial, so if they wanted to publish any further papers, they’re very free to do so. (By contrast, some questionnaire data was never provided to the Oxford researchers; and the final data on motor skills – a primary outcome measure – only came across in summer 2004). To suggest that my well-known dislike of Equazen’s promotional activities makes it ‘unlikely that other papers will be released’ is thus misleading in the extreme. I do wonder why Durham LEA haven’t got on with this themselves – but presumably they’re too busy. Or maybe it’s because they know we’d insist on checking their sums.

2) Unfortunately, media attention dogged our study from early 2002 when data collection first began. The Oxford researchers repeatedly asked Durham LEA to desist from such activities until this trial was completed, analysed and published – but to no apparent avail. This constant premature leakage of information to the media, and its apparent exploitation for commercial purposes, was the reason why our previously good relations with Durham LEA broke down….”

The last couple of sentences speak volumes as to the (lack of) credibility and integrity of the Durham LEA. If I were a parent with a child at a Durham LEA school I would be demanding an explanation at the very least.

dude – what brand were they, and what promotional material came with them?

I agree that when you have these sorts of massive disparities in sample sizes, and in medical studies in general, concentration on p-values is misleading. I was just defending the use of p-values in science in general, and I was thinking particularly of less applied fields, because the argument that with a big enough sample sizes eventually a significant difference will be found is purely hypothetical and doesn’t necessarily apply in practice, and in fact, with the generally small sample sizes found in (non-applied) biomedical research, significant p-values are fairly meaningful.

Recently received free samples of snake oil- sorry fish oil.

Do these people really think that we (teachers) are going to start dispensing these thinks?

They were despatched to pharmacy for distruction.

In the context of this thread I see “in most laboratory studies n will be between 4 and 10″, “63 kids”, “41 children”, “50 children”, “40 subjects”, “117 subjects”. Then we have ‘the trial that ate itself’ with a planned 5000! Admittedly that last trial seems to have more fundamental failings, but aotbe would have much more power than the others. Assuming that the others were appropriately sized to detect effects of clinical significance (I can’t judge that) a (reasonably designed!) 5000 size trial would detect clinically insignificant effects with very high statistical significance (low p-values). This is what I meant when I said

“They will show a (statistically) significant effect if they try hard enough, that doesn’t mean it’s big enough to matter! ”

(By the way, albeit not in a biomedical area, I often work with sample sized of thousands).

“…in very many areas of biomedicine the samples sizes are restricted to a fairly narrow range, which brings the p-value back to effect size and variance.”

Agreed – in most laboratory studies n will be between 4 and 10 – so one rarely uses anything other than simple parametric testing w student’s t – or analysis of variance for comparing same parameter between multiple groups. And in some branches of mol biol no stats at all – if you are trying to clone “the gene for x” it either works or it doesn’t.

The complexity of the statistics in proper trials comes as a definite surprise to people encountering them for the first time…. as usually do the very small effects.

“I don’t have time for statistics when I see a sick child in front of me.”

My response:

You should be thankful that somebody has had time for statistics, or else you’d be treating that sick child by bleeding her.