This is a special paper to me, as this is a paper that is 100% the product of my team at the CSB.Well, 100%? Not really. This is the first paper from a series of projects where we work with open data, i.e. data collected by others who subsequently shared it. A lot of people talk about open data, and how all the data created should be made available to other researchers, but not a lot of people talk about using that kind of data. For that reason we have picked a couple of data resources to see how easy it is to work with data that is initially not collected by ourselves.
It is hard, as we now have learned. Even though the studies we have focussed on (ELSA study and UK understanding society) have a good description of their data and methods, understanding this takes time and effort. And even after putting in all the time and effort you might still not know all the little details and idiosyncrasies in this data.
A nice example lies in the exposure that we used in this analyses, pulmonary dysfunction. The data for this exposure was captured in several different datasets, in different variables. Reverse engineering a logical and interpretable concept out of these data points was not easy. This is perhaps also true in data that you do collect yourself, but then at least these thoughts are being more or less done before data collection starts and no reverse engineering is needed. new paper: pulmonary dysfunction and CVD outcome in the ELSA study
So we learned a lot. Not only about the role of pulmonary dysfunction as a cause of CVD (hint, it is limited), or about the different sensitivity analyses that we used to check the influence of missing data on the conclusions of our main analyses (hint, limited again) or the need of updating an exposure that progresses over time (hint, relevant), but also about how it is to use data collected by others (hint, useful but not easy).
The paper, with the title “Pulmonary dysfunction and development of different cardiovascular outcomes in the general population.” with IP as the first author can be found here on pubmed or via my mendeley profile.
bob siegerink 