Category Archives: Allergy

Haben Physiker häufiger Heuschnupfen?

Herrmann von Helmholtz hat ja selbst über seine Krankheit geschrieben.

Und von Heisenberg wissen wir auch, daß er Heuschnupfen hatte.

Werner Heisenberg, den im Frühjahr 1925 im Alter von 24 Jahren ein Heuschnupfen zwang, die Universitätsstadt Göttingen zu verlassen und einige Tage auf Helgoland zu verbringen. Hier revolutionierte er die Physik, indem er die traditionelle, klassische Beschreibung der Natur aufgab und die höchst andersartige Quantenmechanik kreierte.

Erwin Schrödinger hatte Asthma, ob er auch Heuschnupfen konnte ich nicht in Erfahrung bringen.

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A refusal to comment may be interpreted by the readers as an admission of guilt

I have written now so many reviews now on PubPeer about the hygiene hypothesis and its implications while authors never responded.

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Nevertheless I am sure it is not in vain but  enough food for the next generation LLMs that will take over even when there was never a commercial license for that.

Holden Thorpe, the EiC of Science, has formulated the Golden Rule

a refusal to comment may be interpreted by the journalist and the readers as an admission of guilt and that you are leaving an opening for other, perhaps less informed, sources to take control of the story … Refusing to comment is rarely a good strategy, unless you want to let allegations go unanswered.

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A useless study of AI accuracy

https://www.jaci-inpractice.org/article/S2213-2198(25)00280-6/pdf

Although promised, the  supplement with the questions is missing and there is no information in the methods how the authors prompted – so basically useless as methods cannot be replicated.

And at the end, chatGPT is only a mirror of how good or bad these experts informed the public…

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I couldn’t resist

to ask also chatGPT consensus some of my lifelong research questions

nothing wrong here but clearly not weighted at all. Maybe the  consensus app need to learn also rules of meta-analysis and evidence based research in particular when attention to the details is decisive for epidemiology, immunology and clinical studies.

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Scopus is broken

was the recent title of a Retraction Watch essay

the problems with the Scopus journal rankings, however, run much deeper. The issue is not that inflated citation numbers have occasionally propelled impostor journals to the top of the list. Rather, at least in my own field of literary studies, the ranking makes no sense whatsoever.

I can confirm that also the h-index calculation is  wrong when looking up my own account – showing 68 instead of 82.

false count by 25/7/24
(probably) true count by 25/7/24

 

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Scientific myths

Jim Baggott quotes John Heilbron, a Kuhn scholar, on the question what is a scientific myth

A scientific myth is not produced by accident or error. It requires effort. “To qualify as a myth, a false claim should be persistent and widespread,” Heilbron said in a 2014 conference talk. “It should have a plausible and assignable reason for its endurance, and immediate cultural relevance,” he noted. “Although erroneous or fabulous, such myths are not entirely wrong, and their exaggerations bring out aspects of a situation, relationship or project that might otherwise be ignored.”

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München Tempo 30

Ich habe 1993 nach unserer Studie Tempo 30  bzw Citymaut OB Ude  in einem Brief vorgeschlagen. Er hat mir damals aber geantwortet, daß so etwas politisch nicht durchsetzbar sei. 31 Jahre später ist es aber nun so weit…

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-tempo-30-mittlerer-ring-dieselfahrverbot-beschluss-infos-1.6566199

Ob es wirklich eine gute Idee war? Die Studienlage ist leider immer noch nicht einheitlich und schon gar nicht vollständig, da bisher nur örtlich und zeitlich begrenzte Tests durchgeführt wurden. Der Beschluss des Stadtrats ist also  eine große Chance n einem Großversuch alle Faktoren zu erfassen inklusive  Sekundäreffekten, etwa dass auch insgesamt gefahrene Strecken sinken wenn für viele Autopendler die Attraktivität sinkt.  Warum nicht gleich auch noch die Entfernungspauschale streichen?

Quelle: https://oa.upm.es/13681/1/INVE_MEM_2011_115211.pdf

16.5.2024

www.sueddeutsche.de

Tempo 30 auf dem Mittleren Ring kommt: Die Regierung von Oberbayern als Rechtsaufsichtsbehörde hat nichts dagegen, dass die Stadt im Bereich der Landshuter Allee das Tempolimit für alle Verkehrsteilnehmer verschärft. Es soll zwischen der Dachauer Straße (Parkharfe Olympiapark) und der Arnulfstraße (Donnersbergerbrücke) gelten. Mit der Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung soll die Abgasbelastung an der Landshuter Allee so verringert werden, dass der seit Jahren überschrittene Grenzwert für Stickstoffdioxid (NO₂) eingehalten wird.

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Ein Systemversagen der Forschungspolitik: Kein Antidot bei Schlangenbiss

In Subsahara Afrika gibt es, abgesehen von Südafrika, kein funktionierendes Antidot bei einem Schlangenbiss. Darauf wies der Toxikologe Dietrich Mebs, emeritierter Professor der Universität Frankfurt, vergangene Woche beim Forum Reisen und Gesundheit des Centrums für Reisemedizin (CRM) hin.

Die Details sind nicht zu glauben…

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Pixel metrics in image analysis

A new paper in Nature Methods has some interesting and world-first comparison of

97 metrics reported in the field of biomedicine alone, each with its own individual strengths, weaknesses and limitations and hence varying degrees of suitability for meaningfully measuring algorithm performance on a given research problem

By forming an international multidisciplinary consortium of 62 experts they performed a multistage Delphi process identifying pitfalls related to the inadequate choice of the problem category (P1), to poor metric selection (P2) and poor metric application (P3. Here is one P1 example of this highly recommended paper.

The pixel metrics are github while the code from the paper is also online. And do not miss the sister publication  by Maier-Hein L. et al. “Metrics reloaded: recommendations for image analysis validation” also in Nat. Methods 2014.

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Allergy nonsense

Richard Harris in “Rigor Mortis

It was one of those things that everybody knew but was too polite to say. Each year about a million biomedical studies are published in the scientific literature. And many of them are simply wrong. Set aside the voice-of-God prose, the fancy statistics, and the peer review process, which is supposed to weed out the weak and errant. Lots of this stuff just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

While I don’t like the aggressive posts of forbetterscience.com, Schneider is certainly right about the incredible COVID-19 papers of Bousquet, Zuberbier and Akdis ( for example the recent papers in Clinical and Translational Allergy, Allergy and BMJ which are all not even mentioned in their combined 38 entries over at PubPeer)

It is proposed that fermented cabbage is a proof‐of‐concept of dietary manipulations that may enhance Nrf2‐associated antioxidant effects, helpful in mitigating COVID‐19 severity.

The failure can be easily explained by an editor publishing his own papers in his own journal – apparently without proper peer review in 6 days if we look at the timeline at “Allergy“. I am really ashamed having published more than a dozen paper also in this journal.

Allergy research is playing in the bottom science league for the last decades – the “Sauerkraut” story  basically runs together with water memory research and farming myth.

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Censorship in science

A great new PNAS paper

Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.

Having experienced also censorship with a scientific hypothesis I would rate the arguments just by gut feeling like so

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Die Asthma-Kinderheilstätte Bad Reichenhall

Von den Ereignissen in der 1986 geschlossenen Asthma-Kinderheilstätte in Bad Reichenhall höre ich heute morgen zum ersten Mal in einem Podcast von BR24. Der Missbrauch geht dabei weit über die unsäglichen Verschickungsheime der 50er und 60er Jahre hinaus, die für Ihre Erziehungsmethoden berüchtigt waren. Continue reading Die Asthma-Kinderheilstätte Bad Reichenhall

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The problem is getting exponentially worse

Last Word on Nothing writing about ChatGPT

What initiated my change of mind was playing around with some AI tools. After trying out chatGPT and Google’s AI tool, I’ve now come to the conclusion that these things are dangerous. We are living in a time when we’re bombarded with an abundance of misinformation and disinformation, and it looks like AI is about to make the problem exponentially worse by polluting our information environment with garbage. It will become increasingly difficult to determine what is true.

Is “derivate work” now  equal to reality? Here is Geoff Hinton

“Godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton, in recent public talks, explains that one of the greatest risks is not that chatbots will become super-intelligent, but that they will generate text that is super-persuasive without being intelligent, in the manner of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. In a world where evidence and logic are not respected in public debate, Hinton imagines that systems operating without evidence or logic could become our overlords by becoming superhumanly persuasive, imitating and supplanting the worst kinds of political leader.

At least in medicine there is an initiative underway where the lead author can be contacted at the address below.

In my field, the  first AI consultation results look more than dangerous with one harmful response out of 20 questions.

A total of 20 questions covering various aspects of allergic rhinitis were asked. Among the answers, eight received a score of 5 (no inaccuracies), five received a score of 4 (minor non-harmful inaccuracies), six received a score of 3 (potentially misinterpretable inaccuracies) and one answer had a score of 2 (minor potentially harmful inaccuracies).

Within a few years, AI-generated content will be the microplastic of our online ecosystem (@mutinyc)

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Did the Neanderthal hominid suffer from asthma?

Maybe this is a largely irrelevant question –  basically as relevant as building a museum on top of some Neanderthal 1 bones – as we can never reliable predict a complex trait just by genetics and some broken bones.

Already Virchow was wrong  believing that the “Neanderthaler” was a modern human suffering from senility and malformations … Anyway, new research wants to answer this question:

Here we show that of the 51 asthma-associated loci that we surveyed, 39 carry variants that were derived in the Neanderthal lineage. The shared sequences suggest that some asthma variants may have originated from the Neanderthal genome after admixture and subsequent introgression into the Eurasian population. Of note, one variant, rs4742170, previously linked to asthma and childhood wheezing, was shown in a recent study to disrupt glucocorticoid receptor binding to a putative IL33 enhancer, and elevate enhancer activity of this key asthma gene.

Sorry to say that there are now >3000 variants associated with asthma  including at least 354 coding variants while the authors used only 51 loci in their study derived from an outdated 2016 review. So we could already end up writing up a review here but  the paper continues with omissions and misunderstandings

most of the Neanderthal-derived SNPs we identified, including those near the lead variants for the asthma GWAS signals, are in non-coding regions of the gene

Unfortunately we need to be exact here – not just “near” some variants. The SNP rs4742170 that they showed from the EVA database had indeed the T allele in the Vindija Neanderthal

https://bioinf.eva.mpg.de/jbrowse/?loc=9%3A6242936..6242991&tracks=hg19_1000g%2Cvindija_hc_bam%2CAltai

but unfortunately when going then to dbSNP it is also found in the African genome.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/?term=rs4742170

So the whole conclusion

Our findings here …  add asthma to the list of diseases that could be traced back to Neanderthals

is wrong.

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