lördag 28 februari 2009

Bisfenol A och false positives

Bisfenol A har varit ett återkommande ämne (1, 2, 3, 4), och jag skrev nyss om false positives.

Så för att slå samman ämnena - från Science Daily:

The earlier study, published in JAMA (September 16, 2008) by Dr. Ian A. Lang and colleagues, did not adequately address the potential for multiple testing to result in a false positive result.
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Although the Lang et al study focused on one chemical and 16 health outcomes, Young and Yu note that it is important to focus on how many questions were at issue. They point out that with 32 possible health outcomes, including combinations, potentially associated with any of the 275 chemicals, along with multiple confounders and statistical models, there could be as many as approximately 9 million statistical models available to analyze the data.

Given the number of questions at issue and possible modeling variations in the CDC design, Young and Yu conclude that the findings reported by the authors could well be the result of chance rather than representing real health concerns.

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