It would be helpful to hear more specific thoughts on whether / why this data is “garbage”.
An initial thought on that (since I don’t have time to dive deeper on this today) is that the first source linked in this post says most of the studies did not use a control group:
For the assessment of the quality of the included studies, we used the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale for observational studies.(22) Not every item from this scale was relevant for the included studies as most included studies did not use a control group. Therefore, we used two items from Selection (representativeness and ascertainment of outcome) and the three items from Outcome (assessment of outcome, follow-up long enough, adequacy of follow-up; see Supplementary Material).
Correlation is not causation. If the “best” data is garbage, it’s still garbage. We should not update our priors based on garbage data.
It would be helpful to hear more specific thoughts on whether / why this data is “garbage”.
An initial thought on that (since I don’t have time to dive deeper on this today) is that the first source linked in this post says most of the studies did not use a control group: