Endlessly Amazed
Endlessly, you know, amazed
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2020
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- 1,379
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- Arizona, USA
Marhawkman, you wrote, “even so, only 14.7% of the Ivermectin group had "a primary-outcome event" vs 16.3% of the control group. So, seemingly taking only 3 doses reduced odds of hospitalization (81% of the "primary-outcome events" were hospitalization) significantly”
Respectfully, no. I am not a medical researcher, let alone an expert in live person hospitalization statistics, but I do have a Ph.D. and decades of designing research in my background. Here is my interpretation of why the research did not demonstrate a significant positive effect of ivermectin on outcomes (hospitalizations):
In scientific research, significant means that the results were ones the researchers could have confidence in: what the laymen would term real. The researchers set the credibility or confidence interval at 95%. This is clearly presented in Table 2 and Figure 2. For the ivermectin treatment to be significantly better, the treatment results would have to be more different from the placebo results than what they were. The treatment and placebo results were too close to each other for a clear difference to be concluded. This is also partly based on the size of the population – 679 each for treatment and placebo. For human medical research, confidence in apparent results typically is reached with thousands of observations, not hundreds.
“In prespecified subgroup analyses, there was no evidence of a treatment effect with ivermectin as compared with placebo in subgroups defined according to patient age, body-mass index, status of having cardiovascular disease or lung disease, sex, smoking status, or time since symptom onset (Figure 2 and Table S2). We observed no benefit with ivermectin as compared with placebo among patients who began the trial regimen within 3 days after symptom onset (relative risk, 1.14; 95% Bayesian credible interval, 0.76 to 1.74).”
If either a much bigger population was used, or if the outcomes were more different than they were, then the researchers would have concluded that ivermectin was beneficial.
These results are suggestive, not conclusive. They are not significant. Ivermectin may be very useful – but that is not demonstrated here. I personally think that ivermectin will prove to be very useful, and have followed Dr. Campbell from the UK on youtube about this, especially about the dosage/kg of body weight.
Other observations: Table 1 presents the patient characteristics baselines. The researchers did the best they could with matching the patients receiving placebo vs. ivermectin treatment, but because this is a real-life experiment, and not a lab experiment, they could not match everything exactly. A population of 679 is not a very big population from which to extrapolate or generalize the findings to the general population. There is a big enough difference in the numbers of the two populations (ivermectin and placebo) for the body mass index of equal to or greater than 30, and for females, to get my attention. Also, ethical considerations about giving ill people a placebo is always a problem in research.
Marhawkman, you wrote, “hmmm interesting. They only gave the people in their study 3 doses?”
So, how many doses do you think should have been tried? Why? Ivermectin is hard on the liver, and in ill people, even harder.
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