Dave Curtis

This post is just here because I find myself having to make the same arguments again and again on twitter so in future I'm just going to link to this. Do I know what I'm talking about? I was a psychiatrist in the National Health Service for thirty years. That means I qualified as a medical doctor and then had post-graduate training, which naturally included some material on human development and sex and gender. I also have two doctoral degrees in human genetics, an MD and a PhD, and have been an author on hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, mostly on human genetics. Because of my research in genetics I am an Honorary Professor at two different London universities. My bio is here: http://www.davecurtis.net/dcurtis.html and the publications can be viewed here: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=Vrr4Ig0AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate Do I do research in sexual development in humans? No. Do I understand it? Yes. I've read the stuff that ...

I'm happy to see the article by Boyle, Yang and Pritchard (Boyle et al, 2017)  getting so much attention. Quite justifiably, many people are commenting on it and I thought I would add my two pence worth. To summarise, I think the main claim they are making is that for a complex disease there will be a relatively small number of "core" genes whose functioning is related to disease mechanisms but that a very large number of polymorphisms will impact to a small extent on these core genes through gene expression networks. This then leads to a phenomenon whereby GWAS hits are very widely scattered through the genome. Most of these hits will not be anywhere near genes involved in disease mechanisms, they'll just reflect impacts on generic expression networks in one way or another. Here, I'd like to add another dimension, taking schizophrenia as an example. My claim will be that as well as the core genes there will be many other genes which do have an effect on risk,...

From: International Society of Psychiatric Genetics [ mailto:info@ispg.net ] Sent: 09 March 2017 14:34 To: Curtis, David < d.curtis@ucl.ac.uk > Subject: 2017 WCPG Registration Now Open! 2017 WORLD CONGRESS OF PSYCHIATRIC GENETICS OCTOBER 13 - 17, 2017 LOEWS SAPPHIRE FALLS RESORT ORLANDO, FLORIDA International Society of Psychiatric Genetics , 5034-A Thoroughbred Lane ,  Brentwood ,  TN 37027 From: Curtis, David [ mailto:d.curtis@ucl.ac.uk ] Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2017 11:54 AM To: Info ISPG < info@ispg.net > Subject: RE: 2017 WCPG Registration Now Open! Hi. Sorry, I won’t be coming to the USA while there is a blanket ban on visitors from certain muslim-majority countries and while people from UK seem to be arbitrarily barred on the basis of their colour and/or religion. It’s a shame because I would have liked to attend. Regards - Dave Curtis From: Info ISPG [ mailto:info@ispg.net...

Here is the soundbite which Hunt has been repeating ad nauseam: "And at the moment we have an NHS where if you have a stroke at the weekends, you're 20% more likely to die. That can't be acceptable." Sounds quite impressive? I tweeted him to ask for evidence and got no reply so I decided to look for my own. It wasn't hard to find. I'll deal with the best and most recent example. The headline finding from this paper is that patients admitted at weekends with a stroke diagnosis have an increased 7-day mortality of 19%, apparently just as Hunt claims: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487251/ The 7-day mortality for week-end admissions is 12.9% and for week-day admissions is 11.1% and if you factor in comorbidities etc. this gives you an adjusted mortality odds ratio of 1.19. Just as Hunt says. But let's look more closely. At some numbers buried in the text of the paper and not even given a p value, even though they are probably the most st...

I have two sons. One is 25, the other 18. The 25-year-old is probably OK now. Bright and sensible, we would be extremely unlucky if serious harm were to befall him. For the younger one, though, there remains some cause for concern. Though equally bright and sensible, he is yet to live through the main age of risk for developing the most common and serious illness to affect young people. By and large they are a healthy bunch and serious illnesses are very rare. But schizophrenia is not rare at all. Upwards of half a million people in Britain will develop schizophrenia at some point, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25. I've met hundreds of them myself. And each time I do I am aware not only of the patient in front of me, suffering terrible psychotic symptoms or confused and rambling, but also of two parents who once, like me, had a lively, promising child but who now face a future as "carers" of an adult with severe mental illness. Although factors such as stress...

People working in the NHS can be pretty cynical and bitter and I certainly have some major gripes about how I've been treated by management but in a spirit of fairness I think it's only right to post the email we got at the end of the year from our service director. It's practically a model for the kind of communication a manager should be sending to staff. It's about providing a high quality, compassionate and efficient service and you'll see buried in the middle there that they've been making economies in management and not in frontline services. So if you're working in the NHS and you didn't get a thank you email from your manager please feel free to show them this. Anyway, here is the email in full. It went round to everybody in the Tower Hamlets Adult Mental Health Directorate from the service director, Paul James. Dear colleagues Can I take this opportunity of thanking everyone who has worked for the Tower Hamlets Adult Directorate over ...

Example Ranking Question You are in charge of a large national organisation responsible for assessing the abilities of all the country's newly qualified doctors and matching them to appropriate employment. Shortly before distributing the results and final allocations you become aware that there is a problem with the marking system which you have outsourced. Rank in order the following actions in response to this situation (1= Most appropriate; 5= Least appropriate) A. Cross your fingers and hope it will all be OK. Probably nobody will mind too much. B.  Send out the incorrect marks and allocations then follow with an email saying you will get medical schools to check all the papers and have another go at it. C.  As above but attempt to shift some of the blame onto one of the candidates by implying that their smudgy pencil confused the marking machine so really it's all their fault. D.  Admit that things may not have been perfect but undertake to try to do better ...