You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer and Parkinson strangely linked to viral infections
To do this, the authors of the new work studied health care data from FinnGen, a large Finnish biobank.
and
The scientists then turned to the UK Biobank, the UK's largest database, and analyzed data from 106,000 people, 20,000 of whom had neurodegenerative disorders.
I'm always cautious about findings that come about from sifting through large databases like this. It's far too easy to mistake a spurious correlation for something meaningful. So (IMO), this is an important section in your article ;-)
CORRELATION =/= CAUSATION
Hehe, thanks. I mean, I chose this article because there are known strong correlations between herpes and alzheimer, and sometimes correlations don't mean causations but sometimes...
Yeah, but the tobacco studies took decades and the statistical techniques were more focused. And even with the certainty of the link between cigarettes and lung cancer, I still look at that graph and wonder, yeah, but how much of that decline is because modern medicine got better at treating lung cancer? What would the graph of lung cancer illnesses look like? Statistics are funny things... ;-)
With big data sweeps like the Alzheimer's one, it's too easy for researchers to find the correlation first and then use it to establish the hypotheses - which basically invalidates the finding unless they partition the data properly. Not saying that's what happened here, just that I'm cautious about accepting the results from this sort of study.