It wasn’t a very well written comment, was a bit benign and generic which is maybe why it ot flaggerd. Here it is below To their credit though they reinstated it.
”This seems to be a nice observational study which analyses already available data, with an interesting and potentially important finding.
They didn’t do “controlling” in the technical sense of the word, they matched cases and controls on 40 baseline variables in the cohort with “demographics, 15 comorbidities, concomitant cardiometabolic drugs, laboratories, vitals, and health-care utilization”
The big caveat here is that these impressive observational findings often disappear, or become much smaller when a randomised controlled trial is done. Observational studies can never prove causation.Usually that is because there is some silent feature about the kind of people that use melatonin to sleep, that couldn’t be matched for or was missed in the matching. A speculative example here could be that some silent, unknown illnesses could have caused people to have poor sleep—which lead to melatonin use. Also what if poor sleep itself led to poor cardiovascular health not the melatonin itself?
This might be enough initial data to trigger a randomised placebo control trial using melatonin. It might be hard to sign enough people up to detect an effect on mortality—although a smaller study could still at least pick up if melatonin caused cardiovascular disease.
I agree with their conclusion which I think is a great takeaway
”These findings challenge the perception of melatonin as a benign chronic therapy and underscore the need for randomized trials to clarify its cardiovascular safety profile.”
“
This is the pangram result
This was the lesswong rejection.
Literally just cranked out a 2 minute average quality comment and got accused of being a bot lol. Great introduction to the forum. To be fair they followed up well and promptly, but it was a bit annoying because it was days later and by that stage the thread had passed ant the comment was irrelevent.
Thanks for sharing! I’d have guessed they would be using something at least as good as pangram, but maybe it has too many false negatives for them, or it was rejected for other reasons and the wrong rejection message was shown.
Literally just cranked out a 2 minute average quality comment and got accused of being a bot lol. Great introduction to the forum. To be fair they followed up well and promptly, but it was a bit annoying because it was days later and by that stage the thread had passed ant the comment was irrelevent.
As an ex forum moderator I can sympathize with them, not a fun job!
It wasn’t a very well written comment, was a bit benign and generic which is maybe why it ot flaggerd. Here it is below To their credit though they reinstated it.
”This seems to be a nice observational study which analyses already available data, with an interesting and potentially important finding.
They didn’t do “controlling” in the technical sense of the word, they matched cases and controls on 40 baseline variables in the cohort with “demographics, 15 comorbidities, concomitant cardiometabolic drugs, laboratories, vitals, and health-care utilization”
The big caveat here is that these impressive observational findings often disappear, or become much smaller when a randomised controlled trial is done. Observational studies can never prove causation. Usually that is because there is some silent feature about the kind of people that use melatonin to sleep, that couldn’t be matched for or was missed in the matching. A speculative example here could be that some silent, unknown illnesses could have caused people to have poor sleep—which lead to melatonin use. Also what if poor sleep itself led to poor cardiovascular health not the melatonin itself?
This might be enough initial data to trigger a randomised placebo control trial using melatonin. It might be hard to sign enough people up to detect an effect on mortality—although a smaller study could still at least pick up if melatonin caused cardiovascular disease.
I agree with their conclusion which I think is a great takeaway
”These findings challenge the perception of melatonin as a benign chronic therapy and underscore the need for randomized trials to clarify its cardiovascular safety profile.”
“
This is the pangram result
This was the lesswong rejection.
Literally just cranked out a 2 minute average quality comment and got accused of being a bot lol. Great introduction to the forum. To be fair they followed up well and promptly, but it was a bit annoying because it was days later and by that stage the thread had passed ant the comment was irrelevent.
Thanks for sharing! I’d have guessed they would be using something at least as good as pangram, but maybe it has too many false negatives for them, or it was rejected for other reasons and the wrong rejection message was shown.
As an ex forum moderator I can sympathize with them, not a fun job!