

Retinal vascular biomarkers for Alzheimer’s detection [pdf] - ihnorton
http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v3/n2/pdf/tp2012150a.pdf

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carbocation
Interesting: "After FDR adjustment, significant differences in 13 of 19 RVPs
were found between the AD and HC groups (Table 2 and Figure 2). Logistical
models combining parameters were created for combined AD classification. A
logistic model combining these 13 RVP’s provided good classification
performance (81.2% sensitivity, 75.7% specificity and 87.7% AUC), compared
with the logistic model including only age and APOE E4 carrier status (68.0%
sensitivity, 61.8% specificity and 63.7% AUC)."

Despite the impressive improvement in sensitivity and AUC, this is a small and
presumably preliminary study. Additionally, the training and testing sets
appear to be the same.

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cjbprime
Despite being on nature.com, the journal this is in ("Translational
Psychiatry") is not a prestigious one; in fact, it's an online-only journal
and you have to pay to get your article published in it. It is suspicious that
they couldn't find a better journal to publish such an amazing result in, so
the science is probably bad. The statistical significance of p=0.01 is
unimpressive.

Honestly, as non-scientists we should just ignore new papers like these. If
it's really important, first it'll be published in an excellent journal, then
it'll be replicated successfully, then there'll be meta-analyses that confirm
how reliable the technique is, and it'll get cited and built upon a bunch of
times, and _then_ it'll actually be something that we should consider as
anything other than "probably wrong". Which is what it is right now.

