BMJ Archives of Diseases in Childhood: ''Editor’s note on correction to Crawley et al. (2018)'', 2019, Nick Brown. (SMILE LP Trial)

Perhaps it was an assumption that school records would be made available ( assumption of a lot of things underwrites world view here)

Or perhaps it's the impact of GDPR kicking in between start and end.

Or both?

 

I wonder what the cut-off level of their ingenuousness is. Were there a study in which a treatment was said to have turned ill participants into track stars, would a journal publish that result without objective evidence confirming the "self-reported" claims?

 

My daughter's favourite retort to those who think paralympic athletes reflect the aspirational goal for every disabled person - "so you're modelling yourself on Usain Bolt?"

 

I think there's a whole other layer of GDPR considerations there, so I guess they didn't want to go there - much easier to rely on self-report if they'd determined that it was a viable proxy. But my suspicion is that they'd only checked a sample of the baseline data with the school. Interventions change SR measures without necessarily changing the underlying condition. And even if the intervention changed actual school attendance too, the numbers show that this was by less than a day a week (per individual) on average between the two groups by 12 months.

 

I have previously worked in state secondary schools in the south west of England and my daughter is a secondary science teacher working in the state sector in Somerset. I know for at least the last decade it is standard practice to take an electronic register in every lesson, as well as morning and afternoon form class registration. This is recorded using a specialised school information management system, such as SIMS

See

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCGJugc-TmQ

Literally, modern schools monitor and record everything about their students attendance, progress and behaviour! I'm not sure about primary, but from what I've seen they do electronic morning and afternoon class registration. Parents receive at least a yearly copy of attendance (usually more frequent) along with their child's school report.

It would have been very simple to have asked parents of the children/young people involved in the study to obtain an electronic copy of the school attendance individually and to pass this on to the researchers. Literally, the school's administrator only has to press a button on their computer to produce this data for any given student! Parents/older children would have been fully entitled to have this information provided upon request in England under the Data Protection Act 1998 (there is a newer act now, but the prinicples were the same).

See for example: https://www.tsatrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Subject-Access-Request-Policy.pdf

The researchers could have created a suitable 'subject access request' form for particpants to have used to have made obtaining this limited specified information from their school even easier for them. I guess whether it's worth the small effort depends on how important a researcher feels objective, verifiable outcomes are...

 

another one at Bristol joining in on the LP 'gravy train'
Dr Rebecca Barnes

 

From Buzzfeed:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/inside-the-controversial-therapy-for-chronic-fatigue

In the original protocol :

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/ccah/migrated/documents/smprotv6final.pdf

 

About the school attendance records--this was listed in both the protocols for the feasibility trial as well as the full trial protocol. They didn't report it in the feasibility trial report. They presumably already knew they didn't have the "capacity" to gather those data by the time they wrote the full trial protocol. So why did they include official school attendance records as an outcome measure in the full trial protocol?

 

You mean the "data" that claims kids said they were good school attenders when self reporting?

 

I guess she could say she was only talking about the data she had (what does she have?!)? If she was referring to some limited data, rather than outcome data for SMILE, in response to concerns about 'placebo' distorting scores for self-report outcomes then she surely would have known she was being misleading. No one seems to care about researchers misleading people though!

 

I am not sure what Buzzfeed is but if its not a video of her speaking directly or her own social media content controlled by her then quotes cant be taken at face value.

 

The protocol doesn't say that though. It said:

Maybe they asked and didn't get? Or maybe they thought it would be too much faff and went with the proxy measure instead? Or maybe they got consent, checked a few records, and went with the proxy measure because they seemed to match up OK. We can't tell.

 

Honestly this is worse than doing nothing. It even tries to disappear that there ever was an issue at all. It's completely corrupt. And with Crawley a board member? This is like a microcosm of everything that can go wrong in medical research. It points to serious issues in the peer review and editorial process at BMJ and an enormous bias towards certain researchers who are allowed do-overs.

Same as we're seeing with the Cochrane reviews being allowed to be written and rewritten until they can manage to bullshit in just the right way to make it passable. Completely irresponsible, as if it had no impact on anyone but the authors. The patient population is basically an afterthought, of no particular interest and having no stake in the outcome. They are playing with our lives as if we were just some dumb inert matter.

 

Fair points, but some possible responses:

Seems unlikely that all the individuals would say no - they already had ethics approval. If it was too much faff by the time they were converting their feasibility study into a full trial then that should have been reflected in the protocol for the full trial. If they have data showing that the self-report did not suffer from problems with response bias then they should release the analysis showing this.