<story><title>Turns out lowly thymus may be saving your life</title><url>https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/08/turns-out-lowly-thymus-may-be-saving-your-life/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Calavar</author><text>This is a fluff piece. We&amp;#x27;ve known for decades that the thymus is an important part of the immune system. It&amp;#x27;s not an organ that&amp;#x27;s been believed to be vestigial, like the appendix.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For the study, Kooshesh mined data from 1,146 adult patients who had undergone thymus removal, alongside demographically matched control patients who had undergone similar surgeries but kept their thymus&lt;p&gt;Sure, you can demographically match all you want, but I don&amp;#x27;t think this is a research question that can be answered with a retrospective analysis. The problem is that you haven&amp;#x27;t controlled for &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt; surgeons decided to remove the thymus in some cases and not in others. Was the disease more severe in patients who got thymectomies? Was it differences in training between the surgeons? Was it just an arbitrary decision on the part of the surgeons? This is a critical confounder regardless of whether you&amp;#x27;ve matched the demographics. You really need a randomized control study to answer this sort of question.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Although the risk of autoimmune disease did not differ substantially between the groups in the overall primary cohort (relative risk, 1.1; 95% CI, 0.8 to 1.4), a difference was found when patients with preoperative infection, cancer, or autoimmune disease were excluded from the analysis (12.3% vs. 7.9%; relative risk, 1.5; 95% CI, 1.02 to 2.2)&lt;p&gt;What? What is this? Was this subgroup analysis preregistered, or did they just go fishing when their primary hypothesis didn&amp;#x27;t pan out?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d categorize this study as mildly interesting, but not groundbreaking the way the press statement is selling it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Turns out lowly thymus may be saving your life</title><url>https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/08/turns-out-lowly-thymus-may-be-saving-your-life/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xeromal</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always felt us removing things like tonsils and appendix without a high barrier was always premature. I remember kids wanting to have their tonsils removed to eat ice cream for a few weeks. lol.&lt;p&gt;Even if we have legacy parts in out body, I&amp;#x27;m fine just letting it fester in my body as long as it&amp;#x27;s not trying to kill me.&lt;p&gt;Feels very similar to thinking farming just needs 3 nutrients. Turns out better farming requires a lot more.&lt;p&gt;I am just a plain old bozo though so I could be talking out me ass</text></comment>