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.”
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.
Again that’s a joke to do that.
Damn here’s another “joke” about contraceptives and bone fractures
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD009849.pub3/full
And one another abput yellow fever and HIV
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD010929.pub2/full
And influenza vaccines in cancer patients
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD008983.pub3/full
And there’s another 96 on the first search tab alone!
Just what are those clowns at the Cochrane Library up to eh?
Relevance?
They all use the same Newcastle-Ottawa system to score studies based on their likelihood of bias in the exact same way the Cass reviews do. The method you described as a joke.
It’s not an indicator of bias, no causal study has been done to show that there is a relationship between bias and the Newcastle Ottawa scale
Studies that self select their cohort and don’t include adequate controls are more susceptible to bias than those that do otherwise. Evaluating studies based on their susceptibility to bias is a vital part of the systematic review process.
You can read more about it here https://www.ohri.ca/programs/clinical_epidemiology/oxford.asp