Looking at the Effects of Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment on Aging: Revisiting a Problematic Study and Ridiculous Claims

The scientific community is very broad, and there are many groups within that community whose members intermittently produce studies that are either poorly designed, poorly conducted, or poorly presented and explained. Or all three, for all of the usual reasons. Constraints of time and funding, institutional pressure to publish, the involvement of external interests, and so forth. Bad papers do get published, provided that the authors are subtle enough. This does tend to be a self-correcting problem, when considered over a sufficiently long span of time to allow errant individuals and institutions to blacken their reputations with the community at large. Still, at any given moment, one should expect to see that some small fraction of published scientific papers are problematic, rather than merely incorrect. The problematic paper for today's discussion was published last year, reporting on a study of the effects of hyperbaric oxygen treatment on areas of metabolism that are connected to the study of aging. At the time, claims of reversal of aging were circulating in the media. The paper itself was of poor quality, but far less offensive than the related and entirely unfounded hype. It was the usual circus of ignorant commentary, yes, but also a matter of hyperbaric oxygen treatment providers pushing claims that were completely unsupported by the evidence. Serious researchers will think twice about working with anyone who was involved in this exercise. I talked about thi...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs