Clinical associations between gout and multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and motor neuron disease: record-linkage studies


http://predictpd.blogspot.com/2015/0...-gout-and.html

Thanks for that link - very interesting.

As an aside, I met Michael Goldacre a few times when I was at Oxford - he is an excellent epidemiologist.

The whole Predict-PD website is fascinating.

But I am concerned that there is a disconnect between the epidemiological message (confused and complex as it is, with issues of significance and causality) and the way we, PwP, lead our lives.

We live our lives making decisions: we decide to do this exercise or that, eat this food or that, live in this area or that. But, how many decisions made by PwP are based on epidemiological analysis?

I would hope that the statistical analysis could be presented in such a way so as to inform decision making. For instance, statements such as the following could be used to make decisions:
- living at X rather than Y will increase the expected time you can walk by T years?
- eating food F will on average slow progression by X%?

John