Peter Attia· MD
I think there's a very famous example with predomed which was a study that when it was published was kind of a remarkable finding a very large study something like 7 500 people randomized into three groups 2500 per group uh given basically two different dietary patterns a Mediterranean diet in two versions in a low-fat diet this is a primary prevention study so it was looking at people who are high risk but who haven't had heart attacks or anything yet and it was looking at mortality and the study was actually stopped early again something we're going to talk about in a second because it had such a positive effect so the Mediterranean diet had such a favorable effect relative to the low-fat diet that people were dying at a rate far less such that it would have been unethical to continue the study for the I think the seven and a half years it was planned to run and I think they stopped it in the four-year Mark and sort of declared victory but then something happened Bob what what happened actually so they went they went back and reanalyzed the the this predimid group um the first paper was published in New England Journal medicine 2013 and they had a basically a correction but they they almost like a brand new article um addressing some issues so they did they did a re-analysis that was published in 2018. I think it came from this this fellow named John Carlisle who had this way this this way of looking and I think this was that we have a we've got a email on this with David Allison just a great statistician he talks about this in his article too um as well where he he looked at this but um this fellow named John Carlisle did this analysis where he looked at thousands of studies and he could flag the studies and see does this does this truly look like randomization based on some particular statistics and the predimate study was flagged looking like this doesn't look like proper randomization it might be something going on here