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Worldwide Prevalence and Burden of Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders, Results of Rome Foundation Global Study, 2020, Sperber et al

Discussion in 'Other psychosomatic news and research' started by Andy, Apr 16, 2020.

  1. Andy

    Andy Committee Member

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    Direct link to pre-print PDF, https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(20)30487-X/pdf
     
    Andy, Apr 16, 2020
    #1
    Invisible Woman, Peter Trewhitt and ME/CFS Skeptic like this.
  2. Arnie Pye

    Arnie Pye Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    I wanted to get some idea of the type of questions in the Rome questionnaires but I couldn't find examples of any of the questions, so I'm trying to interpret this paper in a void. The questionnaires themselves are licensed by the Rome Foundation, so they aren't freely available, people using them have to buy a license.

    https://theromefoundation.org/questionnaires/

    My biggest problem with the paper is the selection of the subjects. I didn't think about it beyond that.

    In the paper itself it says on page 14 that they eliminated people from their samples with known diseases like Crohn's Disease or ulcerative colitis or several other conditions. It also says that no independent medical evaluation was done. So how could the researchers know they didn't include subjects in their research with undiagnosed Crohn's, or undiagnosed peptic ulcers, or some other "acceptable" (i.e. not functional) physical problem? How could they know that the investigation the subjects had previously had for their gut/bowel problems was adequate and thorough? Patients with all sorts of bowel/gut problems could have been included in their samples who would get labelled as having a functional disorder when in reality they had never even had the appropriate tests or adequate investigation. The patients who had had little or no investigation of their gut/bowel problems were not excluded from the samples as far as I can tell.
     
    Arnie Pye, Apr 16, 2020
    #2
    Invisible Woman, alktipping, Mithriel and 4 others like this.
  3. Hutan

    Hutan Moderator Staff Member

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    :facepalm: While 'in a large-scale multi-national study, we found that more than 40% of persons world-wide have FGIDs' is technically true, that sounds an awful lot like '40% of people worldwide have FGIDs'.

    Why include that 'world-wide' when you have already explained your study is multi-national, unless you want to somehow suggest that maybe 3 billion people have FGIDs? And that therefore FGID experts are very useful and important?

    And the same with '49% of the entire adult female population across the six continents surveyed'.

    I agree @Arnie Pye. It looks as though someone needs to explain selection bias to these researchers.

    Who are the people sitting around, available to sell their data for a twentieth of a $20 gift voucher? It's probably not going to be very healthy people who earn a really good salary. I know I never even thought about doing a paid survey until I got ME/CFS. I didn't see that issue mentioned in that report as even a small problem. To the contrary, the authors sounded very excited about how wonderful using the Qualtrics service had been.
     
    Hutan, Apr 16, 2020
    #3
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  4. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    And the evidence for that gut-brain interaction is?

    Ah, right, my bad, doesn't need any, it's the default explanation. Talk about setting yourself up for failure.
     
    rvallee, Apr 16, 2020
    #4
    Invisible Woman, Cheshire, James Morris-Lent and 4 others like this.
  5. alktipping

    alktipping Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    no scientific investigation can be done through surveys on line or via written media this is of course just more of the same tripe dressed up for the gullible masses to waffle about .
     
    alktipping, Apr 17, 2020
    #5
    Invisible Woman, Hutan, Mithriel and 3 others like this.
  6. Hutan

    Hutan Moderator Staff Member

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    Oh, I don't know about that.

    I have conducted my own multi-national online analysis based on the comments in this thread. I have found:

    When given the opportunity to comment via the Internet, 100% of the entire adult population in countries spanning the world who commented concluded that the 'Worldwide Prevalence and Burden of Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders, Results of Rome Foundation Global Study' is a load of tosh.
     
    Hutan, Apr 17, 2020
    #6
    Invisible Woman, ukxmrv, alktipping and 6 others like this.

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