RUNSAFE on a road trip to Copenhagen - extremely valuable!

2017.02.06 | Rasmus Østergaard Nielsen

On February 2nd to 4th 2017, the following RUNSAFE-members were on a road trip to the annual congress in sports medicine in Copenhagen, Denmark: Michael Bertelsen, Daniel Ramskov, Camma Damsted, Rene Korsgaard, Erik Parner and Rasmus Nielsen.

Great atmosphere

We really enjoyed this conference since we had to opportunity to network and knowledge-share with wonderful peers from the research community. On top, we had the chance to meet curious and inquisitive clinicians. Thank you very much for a great time.

Tremendous causality- and statistics session

After years of efforts, we finally had the opportunity to contribute with a session about “Simple statistics and non-causal mindsets”. We really enjoyed it. Based on the feedback from the audience, they seem to have liked it as well. The main messages were:

• Avoid p-value-based research - in particular the use of stepwise selection through forward- or backward elimination of variables of interest.
• Rather than pursuing “Black Box Epidemiology”, consider analyzing “closer-to-causal”-associations by including a participation-related variable as primary exposure of interest and non-participation-related exposures as effect-measure modifiers.
• Use incidence-based measures rather than prevalence-based measures while dealing with injury development.
• Consider if the OSTRC-score is a continuous score.
• Pay attention to time-to-event models since they offer outstanding tools for advanced data analysis using time-varying exposures and outcomes.

Thank you to the audience for taking part in a very lively, constructive and interesting discussion including injury definitions, recurrent events, qualitative data collections and the “Gabbett Tsunami” (meant in it´s most positive manner).

Sports Biostatisticians community

We hope that a community for sports biostatisticians (and maybe sports epidemiologists) surface in 2017. Please drop Rasmus an e-mail (roen@ph.au.dk) if you want to receive news in this regard.

Congratulations

A special congratulations to Merete Møller, our tremendous college and friend, for winning the oral competition. Well done and well disserved!

Next road trip

We are going on the next road trip in March. Destination: IOC Injury Prevention Conference in Monaco. We are looking forward to it!