To the Editor.
—Without disputing the value of linking male pattern baldness (MPB) and myocardial infarction (MI) in men under 55 years of age,1I raise several methodological issues.
First, if the authors knew that the nurse-interviewers "may have been aware of the study hypothesis," then why assign only three to collect 90% of the raw data? Add to this the likelihood that the data analysts, too, were not blinded—were the study personnel remunerated in part with research funds? Then it is likely that the bias is compounded.
Were the hospital and telephone MPB self-assessments accurate given that these could be exaggerated, attenuated, denied, inaccessible to view, and so on? Were the possibly nonblind interviewer results prone to the same errors? Both errors may explain the modest agreements (
=0.74) between patients' and interviewers' MPB assessments, which usually yield values in the region of 0.80 and 0.90 among trained
. . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]
