Re: Correcting the scientific record on abortion and mental health outcomes bmj.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bmj.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
by special interest groups. this one was part of efforts to overturn the historic rowe versus wade decision. priscilla coleman herself has been an expert witness in more than 20 court cases. thank you ma am, you may have a seat for your comfort. but this now influential paper, linking abortion and poor mental health, has been controversial from the moment it was released in 2011. so a colleague of my brought my attention to the paper and said what do you think of this meta analysis? and i looked at it, and was really concerned. professorjulia littell is one of those who wrote to the britishjournal of psychiatry, which published this research, asking for it to be taken down. she points to guidelines for this kind of study, called amstar. because it does not meet those standards, we don t believe that the results are reliable or credible. in fact, julia littell says, out of 11 amstar criteria, priscilla coleman s paper doesn t meet any. i have never seen it before.
usually when we critique a meta analysis, maybe four or five of the criteria are met. for a good one, eight to ten are met. i have also never called for the retraction of a paper before, but in this this is a very serious lapse of scientific integrity, in my view. professor littell argues that profesor coleman didn t given enough detail as to how she identified previous research to use, so her work couldn t be replicated. the scientific quality of those studies wasn t clearly assessed, and, littell says, in combining studies to produce an overall average, coleman s method counted the same women multiple times. newsnight has spoken to an independent expert, who agreed there were significant questions as to how this study was conducted. a review co authored by the royal college of psychiatrist, the owner of the journal which published coleman s paper, also found that methodological problems brought into question coleman s results. we should say not all