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Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

psychnewsdaily.com

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Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#21

Post by nefoo62 »

im3w1l wrote: post #5

> Research on judges has yielded similar results. It has found, for example, that external factors as diverse as outdoor temperatures and sports results can influence judges’ decisions. When I hear of these funky effects I always wonder how they relate to AI. Presumably this is somehow related to some kind of lossy compression of the state of the world, maybe similar to principal components[0]? Where the "I feel grum…

I don't have a reference handy, but I seem to recall that that study on judges' verdicts being influenced by temperature, how close they were to lunchtime and so on, failed to replicate. I wouldn't be surprised if the OP study fails to replicate as well. They have a relatively high number of data points (to get an idea of order of magnitude: mortality of 145 across 2064 operations on birthdays) but only reach a P-value of 0.03 on their main conclusion.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#22

Post by lmilcin »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #13

> The study, which appears today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), looked at 980,876 procedures performed in US hospitals by 47,489 surgeons. Of those procedures, 2,064 (0.2%) took place on a surgeon’s birthday. So, only a fraction of the surgeons performed operation on their birthdays. Would be interesting to compare the outcomes using the same surgeon group: surgeries on birthday vs same-surgeon surgeries on ot…

The question is, are surgeons that are likely to work on their birthdays any different from the ones that would take day off.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#23

Post by yellowcake0 »

voxl wrote: post #4
ekianjo wrote: post #2

So they went to fish for correlations and found this? EDA at its best...

I feel like we need an opposite saying for sentiments like this to the age old "correlation does not equal causation", something like "correlation does not mean automatically dismiss"

The website is currently unavailable so I can't read the article. However p-hacking, to which I believe the parent comment was referring, is a separate issue.

I agree that the incessant belaboring of the difference between correlation and causation in these types of threads is tiresome, but I don't think it applies in this case.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#24

Post by spiderfarmer »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #13

> The study, which appears today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), looked at 980,876 procedures performed in US hospitals by 47,489 surgeons. Of those procedures, 2,064 (0.2%) took place on a surgeon’s birthday. So, only a fraction of the surgeons performed operation on their birthdays. Would be interesting to compare the outcomes using the same surgeon group: surgeries on birthday vs same-surgeon surgeries on ot…

I never took the day off on my birthday, but a lot of people do. So it might also make sense to ask why these surgeons are operating on their birthdays. Did they take the day off and went back to perform surgery on a critical patient? Are they overworked? Etc.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#25

Post by randomsearch »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #13

> The study, which appears today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), looked at 980,876 procedures performed in US hospitals by 47,489 surgeons. Of those procedures, 2,064 (0.2%) took place on a surgeon’s birthday. So, only a fraction of the surgeons performed operation on their birthdays. Would be interesting to compare the outcomes using the same surgeon group: surgeries on birthday vs same-surgeon surgeries on ot…

No just "interesting" be essential - without it this is junk science.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#26

Post by pankajdoharey »

OK and how is this observational fact of any scientific relevance? Well there could be a similar observation like Elderly people are X% more likely to die if the moon is in the fifth phase of jupiter. So by some hocus-pocus astrological deduction this is a Study worth considering?

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#27

Post by randomsearch »

voxl wrote: post #4
ekianjo wrote: post #2

So they went to fish for correlations and found this? EDA at its best...

I feel like we need an opposite saying for sentiments like this to the age old "correlation does not equal causation", something like "correlation does not mean automatically dismiss"

How about "if you find a correlation and want to report this as if you think it's significant, then you should formulate a specific hypothesis and perform independent experiments to test it, rather than publishing junk."

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#28

Post by wruza »

voxl wrote: post #4
ekianjo wrote: post #2

So they went to fish for correlations and found this? EDA at its best...

I feel like we need an opposite saying for sentiments like this to the age old "correlation does not equal causation", something like "correlation does not mean automatically dismiss"

Do we? Wait for an hour and there will be a bunch of plausible..apparent descriptions that “invalidate” that “they’re just negligent on their birthday”.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#30

Post by kkoncevicius »

randomsearch wrote: post #25
kkoncevicius wrote: post #13

> The study, which appears today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), looked at 980,876 procedures performed in US hospitals by 47,489 surgeons. Of those procedures, 2,064 (0.2%) took place on a surgeon’s birthday. So, only a fraction of the surgeons performed operation on their birthdays. Would be interesting to compare the outcomes using the same surgeon group: surgeries on birthday vs same-surgeon surgeries on ot…

No just "interesting" be essential - without it this is junk science.

Yeah I mostly agree, was trying to be polite.
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