Are most things that we know about medicine based on bad data?

My wife’s aunt recently passed away after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. I was curious about the disease and came across a 2001 study in the Neurobiology of Aging while searching online. The study found that overall, incidence was similar for men and women concluding that gender doesn’t make a difference in contracting the disease.?

I found this interesting and decided to dig a bit deeper. The study was based on 7,046 persons aged 55 years and older. Curious about these stats, I accessed Prognos Factor and searched for patients with Alzheimer’s, filtered it for individuals over the age 55, and within seconds, was presented with a cohort of more than? 1.5 million de-identified patients. The patients identified by this query? were 63% Female and 36% Male. This data suggests that nearly two-thirds of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s are women, indicating that gender does indeed make a difference.?

Upon further digging, I found several, more recent studies, including this 2018 study published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, that echoed the data generated by Prognos Factor. Alzheimer’s is more prevalent in women than in men.??

So why am I sharing this? First, I am curious? how many other published studies and perceptions about disease and treatment are based on inaccurate data. Second, it’s to illustrate how our knowledge about medicine is constantly evolving and how data and evidence are instrumental at uncovering new, groundbreaking insights. This isn’t only true with newer afflictions, such as COVID-19, but is a constant with every condition and disease.?

In the Alzheimer’s example, gender was considered an inconsequential factor in diagnosis twenty years ago. Today, females are known to be diagnosed in much higher numbers than men and research based on new and abundant clinical data is starting to determine why.?

The healthcare industry is better equipped today to harness and query a vast ecosystem of patient and disease data than it has ever been before. The days of basing medical assessments on limited and incomplete data samples are coming to an end. Platforms like Prognos Factor, aggregate real-world data (RWD) on more than 325 million de-identified patients and link and democratize this data at scale. Through analysis of these vast data repositories, aided by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the possibilities are truly endless. We are on the cusp of a data transformation that will revolutionize healthcare. We have never before had aggregated? health data on so many patients accessible at our fingertips. Real-time access to RWD is redefining medicine as we know it.?