Dear Allstat,

Glasgow University Statistics Department is happy 
to announce that this years Mitchell Lecture will 
take place on Wednesday 30th April at 3pm, in 
Room 203, Department of Statistics, Mathematics 
Building, University of Glasgow.  Everyone is 
invited to attend and there is no cost.

The Mitchell Lecturer this year is Professor 
Frank E Harrell Jr (Professor and Chair, School 
of Medicine, Department of 
Biostatistics,  Vanderbilt University).  The 
Mitchell Lecture is titled 'Information Allergy'.  An abstract is given below.

Information allergy is defined as (1) refusing to 
obtain key information needed to make a sound 
decision, or (2) ignoring important available 
information. The latter problem is epidemic in 
biomedical and epidemiologic research and in 
clinical practice. Examples include

     * ignoring some of the information in confounding variables that
       would explain away the effect of characteristics such as dietary
       habits
     * ignoring probabilities and “gray zones” in genomics and
       proteomics research, making arbitrary classifications of
       patients in such a way that leads to poor validation of gene and
       protein patterns
     * failure to grasp probabilitistic diagnosis and patient-specific
       costs of incorrect decisions, thus making arbitrary diagnoses
       and placing the analyst in the role of the bedside decision maker
     * classifying patient risk factors and biomarkers into arbitrary
       “high/low” groups, ignoring the full spectrum of values
     * touting the prognostic value of a new biomarker, ignoring basic
       clinical information that may be even more predictive
     * using weak and somewhat arbitrary clinical staging systems
       resulting from a fear of continuous measurements
     * ignoring patient spectrum in estimating the benefit of a treatment

Examples of such problems will be discussed, 
concluding with an examination of how 
information­phobic cardiac arrhythmia research 
contributed to the deaths of thousands of patients.



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James Miller
Department of Statistics
University of Glasgow
15 University Gardens
G12 8QQ
0141 3302474
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