Eric Topol promotes paper where GLP1 drugs prevent dementia-- but the effect is too fast to be plausible

Eric Topol is a cardiologist who tweets about medical research. Many think he offers useful commentary. Unfortunately, I am more concerned with his misinterpretations and errors. Check out the latest.

Todd’s point is well taken. It is implausible that a drug can stop dementia just weeks after you start taking it. Eric Topol doesn’t point this out to his audience in his tweet.

In fact, this error is so common that we even wrote a paper describing it. It strongly suggests selection bias or confounding.

Sadly, this is not the first time, Eric made this mistake…..

Here are other examples

Previously in this blog, I detailed at least 4 examples, and encourage you to read these links:

1. Here Topol promotes a misleading observational study of Paxlovid. According to the paper, the drug appears to work immediately after taking it, which would be impossible, and clearly indicates selection bias— a key error of the paper that Topol does not seem to appreciate.

2. Here Topol promotes a misleading observational study claiming vaccines can treat long COVID, which has essentially the same (it works too fast to be true) error.

3. Here Topol inaccurately summarizes a paper saying it compares people who COVID 19 to uninfected controls, when it compares people who had COVID19 and HAVE the POST COVID CONDITION to uninfected controls— sort of a big difference, and apparently to anyone who read the abstract.

4. And here Topol again inaccurately summarizes a paper, falsely claiming it shows that vaccines lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes, when the paper only selects people who had EHR documented COVID19. This is a huge and important difference.

And 5. An example of interpreting a study of an RSV vaccine. Here.

What happens when doctors don't read papers well?

Ultimately, one should be skeptical of accounts that claim to tweet about science if the writers are not good readers of the literature.