A doctor says he withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study showing there were no mental health benefits from using puberty blockers in transgender children. I admitted it.
The National Institutes of Health funded a study that began in 2015 and observed 95 children, with an average age of 11, taking puberty blockers that slow breast development and the deepening of voices.
Transgender advocates have long argued that giving puberty blockers to children who suffer from gender dysphoria improves their mental health, but the new study found no such improvements even after two years. It was shown that there was no.
Dr Joanna Olson-Kennedy, who led the study, claimed the children “arrived in really good shape and were still in really good shape two years later.” new york times noticedher claim contradicts the researchers' finding that about a quarter of the study participants “had depression or suicidal thoughts” before receiving treatment.
Nearly nine years after the study was funded, Kennedy admitted that he did not publish it for political reasons. every times:
This conclusion seemed to contradict previous descriptions of this group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and colleagues noted that a quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.
In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Olson-Kennedy's team has not released the data, as the medical care of this minority of adolescents has become a serious issue in American politics. Asked why, the findings could fuel the kind of political attacks that could lead to bans on youth gender treatment in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court. said.
She said she plans to publish the data, but the team's publication has also been delayed because the NIH has cut some of the project's funding. She also attributed the cuts to politics, but the NIH denied that. (This extensive project has received $9.7 million in government support to date.)
“We don't want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “You have to be right to the point, clear and concise, and that takes time.”
Dr. Olson-Kennedy has served as an expert witness in various legal challenges to treatment bans on transgender children in many states.
The original researchers of the study expressed regret that their results had not been published. One of the researchers, Amy Tichelman, a clinical and research psychologist at Boston University, said the evidence should be made public.
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“I understand the fear of being weaponized, but it's really important to get the science out there,” Tichelman said. “No change is not necessarily a negative outcome. There may be a preventive aspect. We won't know until we do more research.”
Erika Anderson, a clinical psychologist and expert on transgender youth, said: new york post Olson-Kennedy withheld the study, which he claimed contradicted the scientific method.
“We desperately need information about these treatments for gender-questioning youth,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who has the largest grant ever awarded in the United States on this topic. “We are researching data that is useful to know,” she said.
“It is not her prerogative to decide whether to publish or not based on the results,” she added. “It goes against the scientific method: do the research and disclose what the results are,” she said. “You don't change them, you don't distort them, you don't reveal them or not reveal them based on other people's reactions. You, as a scientist, report what you learn. .”
