Posted by Ueli (194.230.15.117) on June 30, 1999 at 22:01:06:
In Reply to: Grey Matter &Women posted by Linda B on June 30, 1999 at 18:42:33:
Dear Linda,
What I'm going to say is NO way intended to hurt your feelings.
But, being myself trained as a scientist, I must stand up in defense of Dr.Goadsby's methods.
As we all know the MRI picture of a (single) CHead does not show any abnormalities. So Dr.Goadsby had the great idea to average the scans of two dozens CHeads and compare this to the average of a similar sample of 'normal' people and thus he found this tiny difference that, as we all hope, can sprout into a cure of our affliction.
In studies like this it is of *utmost* importance to keep the setup as simple a possible and to have a very homogenous sample. I'm sure, he matched his control group as close as possible in age, size, hat number, etc., so the only difference would be with/without CH. Introducing an other parameter (such as gender) could easily swamp the difference looked for, or at least would require a sample 10 or 100 times larger.
Such are the reasons Dr.Goadsby did not include women in his first study. As for the 'mostly men' part, this is probably an artifact of the interviewing. I'm sure, people at the front of CH research have more recent data than the 'hazel eyes' statistics.
If ever anything useful comes out of this research, I'm sure you can profit as much from it as me.
Wishing you (and all others) pain free nights and days,
Ueli