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Comment by pcloadletter_ | Hacker News Reader

Maybe these studies are particularly hard

They certainly are hard, because dementia is something that develops over years if not decades. Anytime it takes that long to do a single iteration of your experiment, it's hard!

Does it need to be, though? You can survey healthy but senior populations about their habits, and then over the following years track what happens.

If medical records were public, the answers could even be in those for any medicines that are prescription based. You could then make statements like "A% of patients who took drug B within C years did/didn't develop disease D".

That's not a randomized controlled trial though. You might find a correlation, but you couldn't actually establish causation, or eliminate hidden variables.

We have to get over this false meme where people think RCTs prove causation and the rest prove correlation.

An RCT doesn’t prove causation, it only might observe another correlation that contributes to our causal inferences based on the convergence of evidence.

We don’t have RCTs for most things that you take for granted.

Well, an observational-only study proves even less.

And any time the object of your study is also a treatment for ED it gets extra hard. ;-)

Don't worry, I caught your innuendo.

It’s hard science. I take viagra every day and have only become moderately demented, so obviously it’s working.

That seems a reasonable assumption.

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