Comorbidities in the diseasome are more apparent than real: What Bayesian filtering etc

[user9876]

They say:

They used a self-report measure of depression, that looks at things like sadness/loss of joy, negative thoughts about self or future and nonspecific physical complaints like sleep problems, fatigue, poor concentration.

Now see how their statement looks when you substitute the actual thing they did measure whenever you see the word "depression":

Doesn't sound all that astounding now, does it?

I think there is a problem when abstracting from answers to a set of questions and scoring and calling it a scale and assigning a diagnosis as anything with a score greater than a threshold. As people do this they forget to think about the actual questions asked and what they may mean in the context that they are being used in.

The recovery criteria for PACE are another example. If they had tried to map a score of 60 back to possible question answers they would realize they were talking crap. But if you view SF36 as a scale and forget the statistical distrubitions what they've done could look reasonable.

Working in computer security one of the big reasons that software fails and becomes attackable is because people don't understand the lower-level systems they link with an use them in bad ways that open the system up to attacks. If feels like something similar happens in this world where people abstract away details and forget what they actually mean - from that they form unsafe conclusions.

 

[Woolie]

The high posteriors in the full analysis, and their sharp decrease in the restricted analysis may indicate that these disorders are heterogeneous themselves: in some subgroups of disorder the symptoms are part of the depression phenotype with high biological overlap but other subgroups maybe independent of depression or adversities that non-specifically predispose to depression.

Similar patterns emerged for insomnia, gastro-oesophageal reflux (gord) / gastric reflux, prolapsed disc/slipped disc, and gastritis/gastric erosions suggesting that in some circumstances they are directly related to depression but in others they are independent of depression (see web tool, Co=MorNet:bioinformatics.mit.bme.hu/UKBNetworks).

When we changed the depression definition to the one defined by low mood and anhedonia, ignoring somatic symptoms [46], only chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia showed co=morbidity with depression, especially with severe depression, suggesting that IBS, migraine, and other above mentioned somatic disorders may have specific relevance for depression dominated by somatic symptoms (for further detail see S3 and S4 Figs and S1 Appendix).”

Thanks for this, @Karen Kirke. At least they tried to address some of the concerns I had.

What a joke: "depression dominated by somatic symptoms". That's not depression any more, is it? Its just scoring high on some of the items that depressed people also endorse. Those items are included for pragmatic reasons, to increase the senstiviy of the self-report scale to actual depression, but conceptually, they are not part of what it means to be depressed, they are correlates only.

 

[Little Bluestem]

The computed interactive comprehensive multimorbidity views over the diseasome are available on the web

My dictionary doesn't even know what 'diseasome' means.

 

[CFS_for_19_years]

My dictionary doesn't even know what 'diseasome' means.

https://www.google.com/search?q=diseasome&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/diseasome

All the disorders and diseases of an organism, viewed as a whole, with special reference to genetic features

1. Highlight the word you don't understand.
2. Click right with your mouse
3. Left click where it says "Search Google for ....(the word you highlighted)."
4. A new tab will open with a Google page showing some uses for the highlighted word.

This works with Firefox. I don't know if it works with other browsers. I use it a lot on this forum!

 

[Little Bluestem]

1. Highlight the word you don't understand.
2. Click right with your mouse
3. Left click where it says "Search Google for ....(the word you highlighted)."
4. A new tab will open with a Google page showing some uses for the highlighted word.

It works! Thanks. That's a lot simpler that open a dictionary tab. I also have Firefox.