Episode: 2880
Title: HPR2880: Evaluating a Study
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2880/hpr2880.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 12:40:32

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This is HPR episode 2,888 entitled,
evaluating a study and in part of the series, health and health care.
It is hosted by AYUKA and in about 14 minutes long and carry a clean flag.
The summary is, we've developed the standards to judge, so now let's do an example.
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Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio,
and another exciting episode that will at least for now be the last in my series
on health and health care.
And what we've done for a few episodes up until now is talked about how you get good quality evidence,
you know, by looking at actual studies and legitimate research results.
And I thought, you know, we've talked about it in the abstract, but I thought as a final thing
what I would do is walk through what looking at a study might be in a way that anyone who wishes
can follow along because I'm going to put all of the links you need in the show notes that go with this.
So if you want to see the study that the abstract that I pulled this off of and other interesting information,
you know, you can do that.
So evaluating a study, you know, you run across something and you think, oh, that's interesting.
Now, it might be it starts with a news report.
Now, a news report itself does not have the information you want, but if it is done well,
it will give you an opportunity to find the information you want.
So I took a look at a site called Medical News Today and found this headline,
new device can detect cancer in just a drop of blood.
Ooh, that sounds fascinating.
Now, this should be important.
We know that early detection is the key to successful treatment of cancer,
and some cancers are very hard to detect in the early stages.
But is this a good place to find information?
All right, is Medical News Today a legitimate site?
Well, I went to another site called Media Bias Fact Check
and Media Bias Fact Check gave them a very high rating for factual reporting
and lists them as pro-science.
That's good as far as I'm concerned.
It also has a caution that they sometimes review alternative medicine topics
but on a similar basis.
So if I'm not saying that alternative medicine is necessarily bad,
I just think it needs to be evaluated with the same kind of standard of evidence as anything else.
I'm not in a woof stuff about crystals unless you can back it up with good data.
So there's reason to think that this site is accurately portraying the information they've been given.
Also, at the top, right under the author byline is a note that says it was fact-checked
and it gives the name of the person who fact-checked it.
This is not definitive, of course, but it's enough information to think that this is promising.
Whoever did this understands at least the way things ought to be done.
And that's a good starting point.
So let's continue.
The first thing you'd want to know about a study is has it been replicated?
And this poses a problem in general because the data you need to check on replication is generally found in academic databases.
Now I'll put a link in the show notes about, you know, how can I find replication of a study?
If you're on good terms with a local university, they might let you get some access.
Or if you've signed up for a course at a local university, that gets you access to the library.
It's not just as simple as doing a Google search, at least not yet.
Now I happen to have a niece who is a university librarian.
And I would offer the suggestion that becoming friends with one of those experts in locating information cannot do you any harm.
They are the professionals at finding information.
Now if you can get access, a good starting point is a site called the Web of Science, which is a database of citations.
It is online, but it's subscription based.
So unless you're wealthy enough to afford a subscription, you won't get to it.
Hence my suggestion, you become good friends with the university librarian.
In any case, the way academic studies work is based on citations, which means a reference to a previous work.
If someone is replicating a particular study, they would normally give a citation to that study.
Now one obvious problem is that by definition, if the result comes from a brand new study, there has not even been time yet for anyone to replicate it.
In the case of this particular study, it's a new result. So there's no replication yet.
But I did find an interesting note where the authors in the abstract say the data that they collected is available to other researchers.
That's a really good sign.
So I will quote what they say.
The authors declare that all data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its supplementary information files, the raw and analyzed data sets.
Again, this is good. The raw data itself.
All of this stuff is available for research purposes from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
So certainly, if you're a scientist, you would not have, and we're curious about this, you would probably not have any problem getting it.
Okay, the next question. Where was this study published?
Well, it was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Now, Nature is a British publication that is regarded as one of the premier science journals.
This is the kind of place you want to publish in, if you can, to burnish your credentials.
So this is excellent.
Now, Nature is sort of an umbrella, and then they have specific titles within, and biomedical engineering is the particular one here.
There are a bunch of different nature publications.
Now, Nature is considered very high quality, but even so would just make a note in passing they have had to occasionally retract articles because of problems later discovered.
Which they do very responsibly. But as a data point in our evaluation, if I see that something is in nature, that's at least a strong indication of quality.
And we can look at the abstract, which is available on the web, not the entire paper at this point.
The paper was just published. It was published February 25, 2019. So as I'm recording this, it's pretty recent.
But there is quite enough information to evaluate whether this is promising.
They're happy to sell you the article or sell you a subscription to the journal. I did not choose to do that.
Okay, next. What about the author credentials? If the study has come from an author with good credentials, that does raise its significance.
But what does that mean exactly?
Well, first I would say the author's author or authors. To most papers these days, it's a team publishing it. So usually have multiple authors.
Should have a good reputation and credentials in the field of study. For example, if it was about treating diabetes, I would want to see some pretty solid credentials in endocrinology before I put any confidence in it.
A lot of people get PhDs and in a lot of different fields. Now, this is little easier to research since you can research the authors on Google.
In the case of this study, there are eight authors, all at the University of Kansas in the United States, and they are in departments like bioanalytical chemistry, chemical engineering, pathology and laboratory medicine, and the Cancer Center.
These are exactly what you would want to see as credentials for authors on a paper like this. Furthermore, all of the funding sources are acknowledged and include organizations like the National Institutes of Health, which is a major funder of medical research in the United States.
Okay, so we've got a study that was done by qualified researchers, published in a high-quality journal so far. We're doing pretty good on this.
What kind of study was it? How was the study done? Well, the technology involved is a device that uses microfluidic chips, which allow very small amounts of fluid, such as a single drop of blood, to be analyzed.
The chip is set up to detect a specific chemical in the blood that indicates cancer, to quote from the abstract.
We used the device for the detection in two microliter plasma samples from 20 ovarian cancer patients and 10 age-match controls of exosome subpopulations expressing CD-24, epithelial cell adhesion molecule and folate receptor alpha proteins, and suggest exosomal folate receptor alpha as a potential biomarker for early detection of the patient.
Early detection and progression monitoring of ovarian cancer. A lot of that probably is absolutely meaningless if you are not a doctor in this particular field.
I have no idea what CD-24 is, for example. But there are a few key things I can pick up.
To me, the key that I'm focusing in is they say that they had 20 ovarian cancer patients and 10 age-match controls.
Now, that tells us that what we have here is a case control study. We refer back to our previous program in this series where we went through the hierarchy of evidence, and this comes kind of in the middle.
It's not the strongest. Obviously, since it's the first study, you couldn't have had a meta-analysis or summary of the literature.
There was not a randomized control trial, so we're down in the mid-range of the hierarchy.
It's not a huge number of patients. There's no blindness or randomization, so it's not the strongest possible evidence, but it's probably appropriate for what they are doing at this stage.
The patients were selected for ovarian cancer because that is known to be very hard to detect in early stages, so this matches what the study was looking for.
Since there are only 20 patients in the study group, the sample size is not huge, but this is an initial study.
With encouraging results, we would look for either or both of a bigger study by this team or a replication by another team.
If these continue to find positive results, that would certainly strengthen the case for this technology.
In summary, this is not an exhaustive analysis, but it was all stuff I was able to do with just a web browser.
If I can do it, anyone else can do it. Just use a little bit of Google through to get in there and see how much information you can do.
The point, as I have said previously, is that I believe in evidence-based medicine, and that means medicine informs by good quality scientific research.
I do not have the qualifications to be a doctor, but I can use my intelligence to make sure that my doctor is basing his practice on sound science, and he is.
But in reading the press and social media, I suspect that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of the articles I read are not well informed.
And if people put in one half the effort in getting health information, that they put into evaluate the best computer equipment, they would be a whole lot better off.
So this wraps up, at least for now, maybe something will attract my attention later.
But for now, I'm going to wrap up my discussion of health and health care.
And I hope I've presented some information that is going to be useful to people in the Hacker Public Radio audience.
And so this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off, and as always reminding you to support Free Software. Bye-bye.
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