Antibiotic exposure and risk of Parkinson's disease in finland: A nationwide case‐control study

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31737957

Given how incredibly common it was for kids in my generation to get prescribed antibiotics for ear and sinus infections, I wonder what other disease it could presuppose to...

 

Is this just a case of suggesting the rooster makes the sun rise?

Inference is no longer a strength of mine, but that deficit seems endemic in medicine so I don't feel too lonely.

 

Interesting question is whether it is the antibiotics themselves or the pathogens that those antibiotics target.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1197638308253360130


Or an immune system somehow predisposed to be more susceptible to those pathogens.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1197883816347684866


So an association, which in real science is not sufficient to argue causation, unlike in BPS fairy land where nothing matters except the predetermined conclusions, but it provides an interesting avenue of investigation with a common link to several potential causes.

 

It seems we are starting to learn how spreading antibiotics like peanut butter over the land has effected human health.

What else will be revealed?

 

Maybe the antibiotics cause Parkinson's disease - nothing to do with bacteria.

I note that the 95% confidence interval for relative risk includes 1.05 - which sounds like this is scraping traditional statistical significance at best.

 

Parkinson's patients had more subtype viral infections pre-disposing patients to PD (or just correlative), and they were inappropriately prescribed antibiotics. Or appropriately for secondary coverage, especially at that CI.