<story><title>Drinking diet sodas daily during pregnancy linked to autism in male offspring</title><url>https://news.uthscsa.edu/drinking-diet-sodas-and-aspartame-sweetened-beverages-daily-during-pregnancy-linked-to-autism-in-male-offspring/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>modeless</author><text>&amp;gt; odds were tripled for autism (OR = 3.1; 95% CI: 1.02, 9.7)&lt;p&gt;This is scientific malpractice! The most ridiculous confidence interval I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen! 1.02 to 9.7, reported as &amp;quot;tripled&amp;quot;, seriously? And of course the data is non-blinded, self-reported survey responses recalling events that occurred many years ago, and the analysis is not preregistered and splits the cohort in an arbitrary way to eke out so-called &amp;quot;statistical significance&amp;quot;  (by the slimmest imaginable margin, 1.02 &amp;gt; 1.00, just barely).&lt;p&gt;How can this dreck be published? Everyone involved should be sanctioned. And everyone who took this headline at face value should seriously reconsider their approach to consuming science news.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danShumway</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s honestly embarrassing to see this article somehow climb to the top of HN. It&amp;#x27;s a mess of statistical bad practice, self-reported data, and potentially confounded or ignored variables.&lt;p&gt;Normally when I see a bad study there&amp;#x27;s like one or two serious problems with methodology, but when I read this through it&amp;#x27;s almost just every couple of paragraphs that the authors will say something or describe methodology that should be giving the reader pause. From literally the first paragraph in the intro:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Changes in diagnostic definitions and guidelines and increased testing availability and funding have made major contributions to this increase in diagnosed cases; under the added impacts of changes in dietary, environmental, and other exposures affecting the intrauterine environment, ASD prevalence has reached unprecedented proportions.&lt;p&gt;Those two sentences contradict each other! You can&amp;#x27;t just tie them together with a semicolon like one thought implies the other. I&amp;#x27;m not even saying that autism cases &lt;i&gt;aren&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; actually rising at all, but you can&amp;#x27;t just go &amp;quot;our diagnostic criteria have changed; therefore environmental and dietary exposures are the cause.&amp;quot; You have to actually put in the bare-bottom minimal amount of work to describe &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt; you think that diagnostic criteria and social awareness aren&amp;#x27;t the primary causes, you can&amp;#x27;t just claim that changing diagnostic criteria itself implies diets are to blame.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s unsurprising that somebody who would write this way would do bad statistical analysis.</text></comment>
<story><title>Drinking diet sodas daily during pregnancy linked to autism in male offspring</title><url>https://news.uthscsa.edu/drinking-diet-sodas-and-aspartame-sweetened-beverages-daily-during-pregnancy-linked-to-autism-in-male-offspring/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>modeless</author><text>&amp;gt; odds were tripled for autism (OR = 3.1; 95% CI: 1.02, 9.7)&lt;p&gt;This is scientific malpractice! The most ridiculous confidence interval I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen! 1.02 to 9.7, reported as &amp;quot;tripled&amp;quot;, seriously? And of course the data is non-blinded, self-reported survey responses recalling events that occurred many years ago, and the analysis is not preregistered and splits the cohort in an arbitrary way to eke out so-called &amp;quot;statistical significance&amp;quot;  (by the slimmest imaginable margin, 1.02 &amp;gt; 1.00, just barely).&lt;p&gt;How can this dreck be published? Everyone involved should be sanctioned. And everyone who took this headline at face value should seriously reconsider their approach to consuming science news.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tpmx</author><text>The r&amp;#x2F;science discussion of this paper 3 days ago is interesting:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;16t4eyg&amp;#x2F;drinking_diet_sodas_and_aspartamesweetened&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;16t4eyg&amp;#x2F;drinking_d...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>