The paper you mention appears in the journal together with a comment by R. L. Atkinson, whose own research and interest conflict was criticized in the blog. Furthermore, the same Italian researchers who produce that paper in the liver journal, also published in Atkinson’s obesity journal at about the same time, presumably based on the same data.
I haven’t read either Italian paper, only the abstracts, but my impression is that the same error—failure to properly account for confounding variables, particularly age—occurs in this Italian data as occurred in the American data.
It seems to me that when you eliminate the research conducted by Atkinson and Dhurandhar, or published in the journal they control, you are left only with the negative results from Europe.
Negative results from the U. S. Navy appeared in Atkinson’s journal, which does tend to alleviate my paranoia arising from the fact that most of the positive results appeared in that same journal.
The ideal test, of course, would be to piggyback on a longterm study like Framingham which presumably has blood samples and weight/BMI data on a large number of people taken every two years. Then it could be determined whether weight gain preceeded or roughly coincided in time with or followed AD-36 infection. I don’t know what the cost of AD-36 testing would be. Of course, it might be that patent royalties would have to be paid to Atkinson’s company, just to do the testing. :)
It may be time to wrap this case study experiment up, and do a “lessons-learned” post-mortem. RobinZ, would you care to do the honors of commenting first on this?
In my opinion, there’s no good evidence that Ad-36 is associated with weight gain. Even though it appears plausible from the results observed in animals, the facts that (1) a clear conflict of interest has been shown for the persons responsible for the greatest bulk of papers on the subject, (2) the studies in humans appear to suffer from severe sampling flaws which may be expected to obscure the proposed effect, and (3) the least flawed study (so far as I can determine) is the US military study suggest that the conclusion is, at best, speculative. I don’t have a proper reference class to calibrate my estimate by, but I would tentatively say that “Ad-36 causes obesity in humans” has a surprisal of 10 bits.
Edit: This estimate is intentionally higher than my prior for the raw hypothesis but still very small.
The paper you mention appears in the journal together with a comment by R. L. Atkinson, whose own research and interest conflict was criticized in the blog. Furthermore, the same Italian researchers who produce that paper in the liver journal, also published in Atkinson’s obesity journal at about the same time, presumably based on the same data.
I haven’t read either Italian paper, only the abstracts, but my impression is that the same error—failure to properly account for confounding variables, particularly age—occurs in this Italian data as occurred in the American data.
It seems to me that when you eliminate the research conducted by Atkinson and Dhurandhar, or published in the journal they control, you are left only with the negative results from Europe.
Negative results from the U. S. Navy appeared in Atkinson’s journal, which does tend to alleviate my paranoia arising from the fact that most of the positive results appeared in that same journal.
The ideal test, of course, would be to piggyback on a longterm study like Framingham which presumably has blood samples and weight/BMI data on a large number of people taken every two years. Then it could be determined whether weight gain preceeded or roughly coincided in time with or followed AD-36 infection. I don’t know what the cost of AD-36 testing would be. Of course, it might be that patent royalties would have to be paid to Atkinson’s company, just to do the testing. :)
It may be time to wrap this case study experiment up, and do a “lessons-learned” post-mortem. RobinZ, would you care to do the honors of commenting first on this?
In my opinion, there’s no good evidence that Ad-36 is associated with weight gain. Even though it appears plausible from the results observed in animals, the facts that (1) a clear conflict of interest has been shown for the persons responsible for the greatest bulk of papers on the subject, (2) the studies in humans appear to suffer from severe sampling flaws which may be expected to obscure the proposed effect, and (3) the least flawed study (so far as I can determine) is the US military study suggest that the conclusion is, at best, speculative. I don’t have a proper reference class to calibrate my estimate by, but I would tentatively say that “Ad-36 causes obesity in humans” has a surprisal of 10 bits.
Edit: This estimate is intentionally higher than my prior for the raw hypothesis but still very small.
I would like to see jimrandomh discuss this before I call it settled among those interested enough to study it—I’ll send him a PM.