[p2p-research] Crowdsourced Health Research

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Crowdsourced Health Research
via ScienceRoll by berci.mesko at gmail.com (Bertalan Meskó) on 9/22/09


CureTogether just reported that they revealed a link between
self-reported infertility and asthma:

Patients at CureTogether who report infertility are 1.9x more likely to
report having asthma than patients who don’t report infertility.

This comes from an analysis of 324 patients. Within the 34 people
reporting infertility, 13 (38%) reported having asthma (the remaining
21 out of 34 specifically said they did NOT have asthma). Within the
290 people reporting “no infertility”, 58 (20%) reported having asthma
(the remaining 232 specifically reported NOT having asthma).

This 38% vs. 20% relative risk is statistically significant, with a 95%
confidence interval of 1.2 – 3.1.



While I think crowdsourced health research is really something that we
will use more and more often in the future, I believe we have to
interpret these results with caution. The number of patients they
analyzed seems to be low. In such small populations, we could find very
strange associations only because of the statistically low number of
participants.

There was a research in which they analyzed 491,000 women and compared
fertility rates between women with asthma and without asthma. They
found no evidence of association.

The authors found no evidence that the fertility rates of women with
asthma, eczema, or hay fever are lower than those of women in the
general population.

I’m sure Curetogether will improve this and come up with other results
as well.

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