Seen the “98% of studies were ignored!” one doing the rounds on social media. The editorial in the BMJ put it in much better terms:
“One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret.”
It was not. All studies that scored high or moderate quality made it into the synthesis. That’s 60 out of the 103 looked at, that’s not 2%.
You are speculating, based on nothing.
Here’s one I found in <7 seconds
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD013256.pub2/full
If you want to find more simply search the Cochrane library for reviews with “Newcastle-Ottawa” in the main body of text. It seems like this is new to you.
The relevance of a joke paper from 2003 to a systematic review published last week is certainly questionable but it seeks you’re trying to imply that Cass discarded anything except RCT’s. The didn’t and that’'s myth #2 from the original Quackometer article.
Where will the goalposts move next?
Goal posts haven’t moved and I’ve already pointed out a dozen of so methodological flaws around the Cass report that you are choosing to ignore.
That’s on you
You haven’t pointed out, let alone substantiated, any. If you truly believe you have then I implore to use the rapid response function on the bmj site and communicate these catastrophic flaws to the editorial team immediately. I’d be eager to know what their reply is.
I don’t need to, it is already happening within the scientific community of which I am merely a part.
Don’t abdicate responsibility to someone else, you’ve clearly got a firmer grasp of the issue than the editorial board of the British Medical Journal. You would be neglecting your duty as “part of the scientific community” to abdicate responsibility on such an important matter.
Indeed the whole medical establishment must be told about the critical flaws in the Newcastle-Ottawa scoring system before other medical scandals are allowed to happen. Imagine having that on your conscience.
Lol first sign that you might actually be human.
And it has already been widely criticized before that’s why there was the parachute joke report. Hence it is already the brunt of jokes to use that scoring scale.
So strange that everyone waited over 20 years and 100’s of systematic reviews in medicine and science before, serendipitously, discovering that the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale was infact no good during these two particular reviews into trans care in the UK.
Just what are the odds?
No the Cass report is just misusing the scale. It’s not a disqualifying tool and the scale still has uses which just means further analysis into the subject matter. Which is why the Cass report needed to be books longer, it’s not comprehensive.
That’s a new goalpost. It’s being used by Cass exactly the way it’s supposed to by scoring studies based on their susceptibility to bias.
If you’d bother to read that similar systematic review on postoperative inflammatory bowel disease you would have seen the exact same usage.