> 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-val…
Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
31–40 of 222 posts
Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
#32> 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…
You make a good point, though I'd like to add that one would expect 1/365 = .274% of procedures to be on a random day (like a birthday). .21% is not so far off that it can't be random chance.
Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
Correlation doesn't imply causation but it could co-occur with it Too long Correlative causation is more correlated with causation than non-correlative causation Too tongue twisting Correlation is closer to causation than no correlation I like that Ignoring possible causation is correlated with stupidity Too cruel Correlation does not equal causation but they are correlated Not bad Anyone else?
Correlation correlates with causation.
Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
#34> 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…
They included fixed effects for hospitals and surgeons: "To test whether our findings were affected by including both hospital and surgeon fixed effects in the same regression models." [1]
Perhaps the link could be changed to the paper itself?
Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
#35> 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…
They controlled for surgeon effects though, so I suspect the result would be similar.
Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
No just "interesting" be essential - without it this is junk science.
Yeah I mostly agree, was trying to be polite.
They included a surgeon control variable in their model.
Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
#37> 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.
I mean surgeries on Christmas probably are way more fatal too since they are the ones that can't wait.
You would excepct that it is the day after your birthday the surgeon is worse (risk for hangover or less sleep).
Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
#38> 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.
Is that a thing in the US, taking a day off on your birthday? To the best of my knowledge, nobody does that in Europe - certainly not in the Netherlands.
Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
#39> They also found that some surgeons did not work on their birthdays Is this partially that better/more experienced/senior/more affluent doctors are taking their birthday off, hence people getting more junior doctors? It would be interesting to see how many more people die on a particular surgeons birthday compared with the rest of their year, rather than the birthday of the surgeon a patient gets.
Those that are working on their birthday also more likely to do so under emergency situations...
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Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
#40Maybe a surgeon is more likely to be assigned to a risky surgery on an elderly patient when it's the surgeon's birthday.
Or they simply decline non risky surgeries because they want to take a day off or leave earlier.