Posted by margaretmarburg on July 28, 2001, at 5:36:49
In reply to Re: Smoking and Psychosis, posted by Doo on July 27, 2001, at 23:27:31
I didn't think the abstract implied causation at all. AFAIK most articles that talk about schiz. and smoking seem to think that smoking somehow ameliorates the symptoms of schiz. not causes them. I think all this one was doing was saying - the correlation is not just with schizophrenia, it's with any psychosis. Nothing about cause.
I DO know there was a study done - in the past year or two - on smoking and depression, trying to determine causation - and they came to the conclusion that smoking causes depression because teenage smokers had higher rates of depression within six months independent of soft signs or vulnerabilities at the start (i.e. they weren't just smoking as a response to subclinical depression).
(I have a hard time buying that. I think almost by definition you have to have some clinical or subclinical pathology to start smoking. Yeah I know that's a gross generalization - but think about the smokers you knew in high school.)
But anyway, that was a prospective study, and if these researchers were trying to assert causation they would have not done a retrospective ("history of psychosis") study, they would have followed bipolar smokers for a length of time to determine their likelihood of developing psychosis.
> > Correlation is NOT causation!
>
> I totally agree with you. So often poeple think they see causes where the only think we can observe is correlation. It drives me nuts sometimes. Isolating factors is a hard job, but it MUST be done before we say there is causation. And in so many cases it is simple impossible. Poeple who smoke have more severe simptoms. We can't say that cigarette is the cause. I haven't read those articles. But I wonder if any valid method has been used. Did they make some poeple stop to smoke to see if their symptoms were less severe? And if it was the case, maybe the symptoms diminished because of the satisfaction they could feel participating in such a research. And so on.
>
> Why do so many scientists and searchers (who are supposedly known for their great logical capabilities) fall into the trap? I don't know. Maybe it's just a matter of having a paper published. Need for recognition, need that seems stronger than the mature and responsible part of them, which can think in a honest, and logical way.
>
> Doo.
poster:margaretmarburg
thread:72093
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20010725/msgs/72210.html