Covidence study

L

Londinium

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
New 12,000 participant, five-year study from QMUL on COVID-19: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/covidence/

Some warning signs here...

Why will I be asked about my mental well-being as well as my physical health?



Our mental health, particularly depression and anxiety, is closely entwined with our physical health and can play a role in how well we fight an illness or respond to treatment. That’s why we’ll be asking some questions about your mental well-being as well as your physical health.
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I could write the conclusion right here and now.

They will cherry-pick dishonestly-worded biased questionnaire answers deliberately conflating illness with mental distress, using it backwards to show that mental distress and fear of getting sick with COVID, are the main "predictive" factors (obviously since they are using the consequence of and reversing the arrow of causality) and recommend to expand IAPT to provide online CBT for COVID patients as the only evidence-based treatment that "works", call it job done and say biomedical research is not advised since it would likely "aggravate" those "predictive" factors.

Science is not supposed to be predictable. In fact it's usually a bad sign when the outcome is predictable. One of the worst things to come out of the LHC is that it just confirmed what was predicted and nothing more. It did not open any more questions and that legitimately was the worst possible outcome. And here this school of thought is pretty much entirely predictable, up to and including the language used, since it just keeps doing the same things over and over again and saying them in various combinations of the same logical fallacies and thought-terminating clichés.

All for the very low price of hundreds of millions, yielding "savings" of negative billions, nothing that clever accounting can't fix. After all, if you don't measure it it doesn't exist.

It's like the Wizard of Oz having to face an actual threat. It works great on stage but will stumble about as quickly as your average bullshido artist.
 
Longitudinal Population-based Observational Study of COVID-19 in the UK Population (COVIDENCE UK)
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04330599

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcome Measures :
  1. Incidence of confirmed COVID-19 [ Time Frame: 5 years ]

Secondary Outcome Measures :
  1. Incidence of probable or suspected COVID-19 [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  2. Incidence of COVID-19 requiring hospitalisation [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  3. Incidence of COVID-19 requiring ventilatory support [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  4. Incidence of fatal COVID-19 [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  5. Symptom duration per COVID-19 episode [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  6. Symptom severity per COVID-19 episode [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  7. Incidence of seroconversion to SARS-CoV-2 [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  8. Incidence of recurrent COVID-19 [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  9. EQ-5D-3L health-related quality of life score [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  10. Health care costs associated with incident COVID-19 [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  11. Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the societal response on participants' financial status [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  12. Incidence of COVID-19 on participant's physical health [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  13. Impact of COVID-19 on participants' mental health [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
  14. Impact of COVID-19 on physical health of offspring born to participants during follow-up [ Time Frame: 5 years ]
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@rvallee Yes, that is my fear. "People who had the strongest beliefs they were seriously ill had the worst outcomes, thus proving that the belief caused the illness." If one has the sincere belief that long-term effects of illnesses are psychological in nature, it is easy to design a flawed study that shows exactly that.

I'm thinking of proposing a similar study. I will interview patients and their relatives in oncology departments. My suspicion is that the belief that one has cancer can be shown to be strongly correlated with mortality, and thus this study will confirm my hypothesis that pessimism kills.
 
Londinium said:
I'm thinking of proposing a similar study. I will interview patients and their relatives in oncology departments. My suspicion is that the belief that one has cancer can be shown to be strongly correlated with mortality, and thus this study will confirm my hypothesis that pessimism kills.
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Ah, a replication study!

This is the gist of Eysenk's "cancer survival is related to attitude", which Simon Wessely dubbed (loosely paraphrased) "possibly the most significant finding in cancer research in decades".

That's the beauty here, that one can make jokes about absurdly bad pseudoscience experiments and... they've been done. In fact were very popular for a while. In fact are still taught and believed to this day. I mentioned this a while ago, a psychology grad student (Edinburgh, I think) posted a survey on the CFS subreddit and explicitly mentioned this, how outlook and attitude have been shown to be significant in cancer as a justification for why they are doing this.

It's literally a joke. And it's also literally taught and believed by many who work in medicine, used in everyday practice. Which really explains why things are completely FUBAR. Just like that infectious disease specialist who thinks PVFS is psychological and thus even though he clearly laid out a particularly severe case, or at least something that is nearly identical, of PVFS he could not accept this since in his mind PVFS is psychological while what he is experiencing is serious, unlike our "unhelpful illness beliefs".

Dumpster. Fire.
 
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