John Belmont
@jwbelmon.bsky.social
1.9K followers 2.5K following 830 posts
#MD, #PhD | #Pediatrics | #Medical #Genetics | #Human #Genetics | #Cardiovascular | #Congenital | #Genome #Sequencing | #HealthEcon | #Causal #Inference belmontgenetics.org
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Reposted by John Belmont
christosargyrop.bsky.social
The screenshots are so cool (discussed mortality up to the end of 2023)

Interview in late 2025 discusses excess deaths (estimated as 2% by the interviewee and attributed to long covid) and drops in mortality due to glp1ra estimated to be ~6% by 2030.

insurancenewsnet.com/innarticle/s...
Reposted by John Belmont
pwgtennant.bsky.social
I highly recommend this talk for anyone doing applied quantitative research! It was by far the best talk at #EuroCIM2025!
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Happy to announce that I'll give a talk on how we can make rigorous causal inference more mainstream 📈

You can sign up for the Zoom link here: tinyurl.com/CIIG-JuliaRo...
Causal inference interest group, supported by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies

Seminar series
20th October 2025, 3pm BST (UTC+1)

"Making rigorous causal inference more mainstream"
Julia Rohrer, Leipzig University

Sign up to attend at tinyurl.com/CIIG-JuliaRohrer
Reposted by John Belmont
theatlantic.com
Pediatrics has long endured a workforce shortage. Now the Trump administration’s crackdown on vaccines is turning a difficult profession into an impossible one. @katherinejwu.com spoke with pediatricians about the looming crisis their jobs may face:
Pediatricians Are Rapidly Losing Incentives to Offer Vaccines
The Trump administration’s crackdown is turning a difficult profession into an impossible one for some doctors.
bit.ly
Reposted by John Belmont
chrisgeidner.bsky.social
An “immigration judge” is not an actual judge in the judicial branch. They are a DOJ employee.

As Judge Young, an actual judge, made clear in one of the truly essential parts of his Tuesday ruling. www.lawdork.com/p/judge-will...
Detailing the reality of ICE and immigration enforcement, Young wrote:

ICE has nothing whatever to do with criminal law enforcement and seeks to avoid the actual criminal courts at all costs. It is carrying a civil law mandate passed by our Congress and pressed to its furthest reach oy the President. Even so, it drapes itself in the public's understanding of the criminal law though its "warrants" are but unreviewed orders from an ICE superior and its
"immigration courts" are not true courts at all but hearings before officers who cannot challenge the legal interpretations they are given.
Reposted by John Belmont
cameronpat.bsky.social
the discussion of drop out in this is the most interesting part to me (and they use m-DAGs!), but just skimming it, I think they’ve considered only a case with every conceivable arrow affecting dropout which makes the summary table a little unfair IMO.
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Just finished reading this *excellent* article by Gabriel et al. which discusses which effects can be identified in randomized controlled trials. With DAGs!>

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Elucidating some common biases in randomized controlled trials
using directed acyclic graphs

Although the ideal randomized clinical trial is the gold standard for causal inference, real randomized trials often suffer
from imperfections that may hamper causal effect estimation. Stating the estimand of interest can help reduce confusion
about what is being estimated, but it is often difficult to determine what is and is not identifiable given a trial’s specific
imperfections. We demonstrate how directed acyclic graphs can be used to elucidate the consequences of common imperfections,
such as noncompliance, unblinding, and drop-out, for the identification of the intention-to-treat effect, the total
treatment effect and the physiological treatment effect. We assert that the physiological treatment effect is not identifiable
outside a trial with perfect compliance and no dropout, where blinding is perfectly maintained Table 1 showing the Identifiability of target estimands depending on whether there is blinding, full compliance, and no drop-out An example DAG from the paper.
Fig. 4: A blinded trial with noncompliance.

U are unobserved confounders, Z is treatment assignment, C is compliance, X is the realized treatment, S is the subject's physical and mental health status, Xself and Xcln are the treatment that the participant and the clinician believed the participant received, Y is the outcome.
jwbelmon.bsky.social
Hat needs to be bigger
Reposted by John Belmont
namnezia.bsky.social
The Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio, built in 1637 at the original location of the University of Bologna. The university dates from 1563.
Disection table
jwbelmon.bsky.social
Pink Brugmansia - they love the warm damp mornings 🌱
jwbelmon.bsky.social
Pink Brugmansia - they love the warm damp mornings 🌱
jwbelmon.bsky.social
Clearing slots for Kristi Noem
jwbelmon.bsky.social
There are so many things that trained medical personnel see and hear and feel that don’t get recorded in textbooks or the patient medical records. AI could assist in following guidelines. Not close to being able to practice by itself.
Reposted by John Belmont
Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) here. RFK Jr. is a clear and present danger to all Americans, and to the world. He is a menace and a threat to life, health, and liberty, a mockery of a Health Secretary, and a true enemy of the people. Fire him now.
kylec.bsky.social
NEW: Colorado Gov Jared Polis did not answer directly when I asked if RFK Jr has done more harm than good for Americans’ health. Polis enthusiastically supported RFK Jr for HHS Secretary. #copolitics
Reposted by John Belmont
atrupar.com
FOX: Do you agree with Florida ending all childhood vaccine mandates?

MEHMET OZ: I would definitely not have mandates for vaccinations
Reposted by John Belmont
michelnivard.bsky.social
I wrote about a rare genetic variant (a CNV) that appears to reduce the risk of schizophrenia diagnosis by ~5x, and why that's not as unambigously amazing as it sounds, but potentially still a pretty big deal.
Its probably nothing, but if it is...
A rare copy number variant appears to significantly reduce the risk of schizophrenia.
open.substack.com
jwbelmon.bsky.social
RCT probably not feasible or ethical.
jwbelmon.bsky.social
Would be good to see independent data sets. Perhaps immune correlates of disease risk and vaccine response.
jwbelmon.bsky.social
I don’t think you will see a DAG solution because they aren’t solutions. Without mentioning an entire stream of CI, Potential Outcomes, whose practitioners take a dim view of DAGs as anything more than pedagogy.

Geneticists argue about common and rare variants. Also an ‘everyone’s right’.