More PACE trial data released

Sort is irrelevant, you can't have a coherent database without IDs cross-referencing entries between tables. If IDs were excluded it was deliberate. It'd be like trying to organize a library of books with no covers or titles.

I did a lot of DB development, architecture and optimization. This is 101.

 

So if their data & data management processes are a mess - ie not up to basic standards, surely further undermines whole original trial as unreliable.

 

I've also done my share of DB development. But nobody uses database software to analyse or store data from a scientific study. It would be a huge amount of overkill, and your statistical software wouldn't be able to read it. It would be like hiring a librarian to organise one Billy bookcase. Every study dataset I have ever seen is basically a spreadsheet, with records in the rows and variables in the columns. Indeed, a surprising number of studies are analyzed in Excel. PACE was analyzed with Stata, SAS, and SPSS, all of which assume the data is in a simple row/column form. The principle of using a key (such as a participant ID) to tie records together if they happen to get split across multiple files is of course the same as in database design, but this ought to be much simpler (not least because there shouldn't be multiple files!)

You could certainly make a good case for that. If the stories that they expect people to believe are true, then they are massively incompetent, to the point where they shouldn't be entrusted with anybody's data, let alone that of vulnerable patients. If not, then they are being wilfully obstructive. This whole story about "It would take a qualified statistician dozens of hours to identify the appropriate elements of the data" is almost certainly bollocks, relying on the judge not understanding the (very modest) technicalities of the process.

Also remember that PLoS ONE issued an Expression of Concern about the PACE "cost effectiveness" paper. Journals don't like doing that sort of thing, so they must have been unconvinced by the excuses of the authors. (They should, of course, have retracted the paper, in line with their stated policy of mandatory data sharing, but even the slap on the wrist in the form of an EoC won't have been done without a fair amount of failed negotiations with the authors.)

PS: As people here may or may not know, I'm not an ME patient, nor do I know (in real life) anyone who is. Over the past few years I've developed an interest in detecting and discussing (not to say "exposing") bad science, but I only got interested in this topic because for a while Jim Coyne was my PhD advisor and so PACE was often going past on my radar. Up to now I was always a little skeptical about some of the claims being made about the PACE researchers because of the obvious possibility for motivated reasoning, but the evidence that the researchers have at least something to hide certainly seems to be accumulating.

 

Huge thank you for your work @sTeamTraen

 

Not what I was saying. I'm well aware that sort order is inapplicable to a relational database, else it would not be relational. But once you've extracted that data, or a subset of it, into a spreadsheet format, then sort order does matter if you want to correlate different spreadsheets you've been provided with, and be confident the participants (=> rows) match. Patrticipant IDs would be best.

Remember participant IDs were never provided with the original 2016 dataset, so even if we had them this time around we would still be no better off. It's only once you need to marry up 2 or more data subsets the omission becomes an issue.

I think this means that in future we need to ensure that for any FOI request (including the 'first' one), we explicitly request unique (anonymised) participant IDs, guaranteed to be the same per participant for any further data subsets extracted.

 

That's interesting to know. In which case I can see where you and others are coming from. I think in future, for our own peace of mind, it would always be good to get unique patient IDs with every dataset requested; then we never have to trust the data providers to have got it right, because we can actively check.

 

QMUL should be asked for a complete consistent set of all the data that has been ordered to be released. If they refuse and it gets escalated through the FOI and appeal process I can imagine a judge not looking favorably on their deliberate attempt to avoid complying with their FOI obligations.

 

What's to stop them creating new identifiers for each set? What should be asked for is a set containing all the previously released data plus the newly requested data.

 

Which is why I said this ...

... they would be flagrantly breaching the FOI requests if they did as you suggest.

I do agree with you in principle, but worry it would potentially give wriggle room to turn FOI requests down more easily, if we ask for cumulative datasets that are potentially requested by different people, not necessarily all collaborating with each other. I think it might get messier than it might appear. Their own data simply must have a unique participant identifier code of some kind, and it is that which we need to acquire each time.

 

I admit to knowing nothing about how FOI works beyond what I gained by reading the ruling on Aleem's case. But I would have thought that once data had been released to one person the precedent would be set so asking for the already released data plus something new would just involve consideration of the new data, plus whether the combination makes identification more likely. Whether you ask for a complete set or new data plus an identifier that allows linking to the old set should make no difference, but a complete set would avoid all confusion.

But since the original Matthees data set didn't include that a new FOI would be needed for that anyway.

 

Something to hide is a bold claim, but what is abundantly clear is they are not acting in good faith and seem to have deep contempt for anyone who asks difficult questions.

I mean patients demonstrated to them (in The Lancet) their criteria for "normal range" was fundamentally flawed, in response they provided excuses and misdirection (in The Lancet), then proceeded to use that same criteria to mean "recovery" in Psychological Medicine. That was 2013 and things have not improved since then.
As an aside, I am somewhat curious as to where such lack of good faith towards the concerns of patients has existed in the history of medical research...

 

Unless a new FOI request included enough of the previously released data to reliably marry up new with old anyway, in which case it would make sense to just ask for for a cumulative dataset, as well as unique participant IDs for good measure.

 

In Aug 2018 the MRC said they hoped to make the PACE trial data available on the CSDR within 6-12 months
see post here
https://www.s4me.info/threads/foi-request-re-pace-cost-effectiveness-analysis.7482/#post-133461

so not long to go before the 12 months is up. Wonder if they will have similar problems with the data?

 

does this mean that @Chris Ponting will be able to access it?

 

There is an interesting nugget, can't remember where it was mentioned but I think it was from Sharpe, that stated that one of the issues they faced at one point was that a single participant retracted their consent and this delayed the analysis by weeks.

If that's true it's massively incompetent. Removing a single participant from the data should be trivial, a matter of minutes.

So there could be something to the massively incompetent possibility. That's simply not normal with the budget they were operating on.