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Friday 12 September 2014

A Statistician Evaluates DeStefano 2004 and Hooker 2014 - I Speak of Dreams

Here are the summaries of the statistician's findings on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two papers, which evaluated the same dataset. A summary is here.
My Verdict on the DeStefano Study

The criticism that the study discarded data from African American subjects just doesn’t hold water. No data was discarded. For the subjects who were linked to birth certificates, the researchers performed additional analyses. In this light, I see a careful observational study that assessed the role of potential confounders.

The biggest weakness that I see for this study is that the researchers could not compare subjects who were vaccinated for MMR to those who were not vaccinated at all. The authors wrote that they “lacked an unvaccinated comparison group.” The truth is that the vast majority of kids are vaccinated. Consequently, this study compared the distribution of vaccination ages for case and control children to see if the timing impacted the risk of autism. It didn’t.

My Verdict on the Hooker Study...

Read the full post by Liz Ditz at: A Statistician Evaluates DeStefano 2004 and Hooker 2014 - I Speak of Dreams