This is interesting, but 1) it does not test the effects of fish oil as a mood stabilizer and 2) there is something sketchy about the way the data are reported.
1) It is a study of vitamin, mineral and essential oil supplements. There is no basis for ascribing any measured effect to essential oils as such.
2) In a number-rich report, it's odd that they don't report either the number or distribution of incidents in any detail, and I can't make their averages work out.
For example, they have 172 people in the study for an average of 142 days, and they talk about numbers like 11 and 16 incidents per thousand person-days, which would lead one to predict around 170x140x(11 to 16)/1000 ~ 250 - 300 incidents, but they then go on to talk about studying 754 Governor and minor reports, or 338 Governor reports and 416 minor reports (in all cases the reports appear to cover the full study population, which is the majority of the prison population).
One can conclude from this that most of the incidents in the prison are due to the people who weren't in the study, maybe? I don't know, but there's something odd going on.
Furthermore, they don't given any idea of individual variation within the population. The conclusion you'd draw if most of the incidents are associated with a few individuals vs spread out across the population might not be the same. Were all individuals pretty much similar in their response, or was the effect localized to some? The results as reported are consistent with a few problematic individuals becoming peaceful and everyone else getting slightly worse.
When making an argument that an intervention is good for a population, you really have to dig into the support for the claim across the population, not report averages as if they could only arise one way.
So while this is intriguing an interesting, it isn't as strongly convincing as one would like.
What I'd like to see (and would have insisted on as a reviewer) is a table showing the raw numbers of minor and Governor's reports issued on each population over the study period, and at least histograms showing the number of individuals in each populations with N Governor's and M minor reports against them, which would allow one to judge the distribution of incidents in the population.
Comments
This is interesting, but 1) it does not test the effects of fish oil as a mood stabilizer and 2) there is something sketchy about the way the data are reported.
1) It is a study of vitamin, mineral and essential oil supplements. There is no basis for ascribing any measured effect to essential oils as such.
2) In a number-rich report, it's odd that they don't report either the number or distribution of incidents in any detail, and I can't make their averages work out.
For example, they have 172 people in the study for an average of 142 days, and they talk about numbers like 11 and 16 incidents per thousand person-days, which would lead one to predict around 170x140x(11 to 16)/1000 ~ 250 - 300 incidents, but they then go on to talk about studying 754 Governor and minor reports, or 338 Governor reports and 416 minor reports (in all cases the reports appear to cover the full study population, which is the majority of the prison population).
One can conclude from this that most of the incidents in the prison are due to the people who weren't in the study, maybe? I don't know, but there's something odd going on.
Furthermore, they don't given any idea of individual variation within the population. The conclusion you'd draw if most of the incidents are associated with a few individuals vs spread out across the population might not be the same. Were all individuals pretty much similar in their response, or was the effect localized to some? The results as reported are consistent with a few problematic individuals becoming peaceful and everyone else getting slightly worse.
When making an argument that an intervention is good for a population, you really have to dig into the support for the claim across the population, not report averages as if they could only arise one way.
So while this is intriguing an interesting, it isn't as strongly convincing as one would like.
What I'd like to see (and would have insisted on as a reviewer) is a table showing the raw numbers of minor and Governor's reports issued on each population over the study period, and at least histograms showing the number of individuals in each populations with N Governor's and M minor reports against them, which would allow one to judge the distribution of incidents in the population.