End of week links

Drug innovation and disease burden. Five lessons not learned from previous government shutdowns. “parents of daughters…become almost twice as risk-averse as parents of sons” Immigration and health care wait time in the US. Drug “kingpin captures cause large…increases to the homicide rate”

Do pharmaceuticals improve quality of life? A Bayesian answer to the question when there is missing data

Let’s say we are interested in determining whether a particular treatment improves quality of life. Common measures of quality of life include EQ-5D, SF-12, and SF-36, among others. However, a systematic review of 237 randomized controlled trials found that only 43% collected SF-12 or SF-36 measures. If you are measuring a treatment’s effect on quality…

Causality: Bradford Hill criteria

If you observe two things occuring, how can you know whether event A causes event B. For instance, consider the case of patients who use a given treatment and finding that they have better health outcomes. While this relationship could be causal in nature, it may not be. For instance, if only people with higher…