Puberty blockers linked to lower suicide risk for transgender people

[MrFanti]

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/puberty-blockers-linked-lower-suicide-risk-transgender-people-n1122101

[collinswriters]

Take this with a grain of salt. It's just a study with very few people who went through the process. Nothing scientific about it.

[filghy2]

Why do you say it's not scientific? Are you a scientist, and have you read the study?

I'll wager that the finding has more science behind it than the people who are trying to ban the treatment.

[Stavros]

Take this with a grain of salt. It's just a study with very few people who went through the process. Nothing scientific about it.

Very few people? The report is based on a survey of 20,619 which is a lot in terms of transgender studies. Also, puberty blockers may be controversial when applied to boys and girls of a certain age, but they are reversible, and most of the opposition to them has come, as the link shows, from Republican run States where anything with the word 'gender' in it is a green light for repression. If there is anywhere where the science is garbage, it is in South Dakota, Georgia and Kentucky.

[sukumvit boy]

Yes,this is solid science as recommended by the CDC.https://www.cdc.gov/lgbthealth/transgender.htm

[nysprod]

Yes,this is solid science as recommended by the CDC.https://www.cdc.gov/lgbthealth/transgender.htm

All tests regarding medications are done as double-blind studies where neither the clinician or subject knows if the medication being tested is real or placebo.

This obviously isn't the case with this study:

Transgender individuals who received puberty blockers during adolescence have a lower risk of suicidal thoughts as adults than those who wanted the medication but could not access them, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Pediatrics.

You could just as easily say the results have more to do with access to the meds rather than the meds themselves.

That being said, having a pre-pubescient transgender person on them is probably a good thing and certainly preferable to the situation where there's no access.

[collinswriters]

This is mostly just a survey. Not a "scientific research" like I said earlier. You'll need more than the info provided to prove it really does what you claim it does.

[filghy2]

How is the scientific evidence to be obtained if access to the treatment is severely restricted? The people wanting to ban this treatment are not doing so because they have carefully evaluated the scientific evidence.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/over-dozen-new-bills-target-trans-youth-lgbtq-advocates-warn-n1118826

The treatment has been endorsed previously by reputable medical organisations, which suggests the case for it does not depend on this one study.

[thombergeron]

This is mostly just a survey. Not a "scientific research" like I said earlier. You'll need more than the info provided to prove it really does what you claim it does.

The article was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Pediatrics, so it is quite clearly scientific research. Perhaps what you mean is that the data is cross-sectional, and so causality cannot be assigned based upon these data. It's conceivable, for instance, that patients who request puberty blockers or are from a family that supports pubertal suppression already have lower risk of mental health disorders and suicidality, and that the puberty blockers themselves are not the causal mechanism for better mental health outcomes.

Nonetheless, even with cross-sectional data, the study has value. It adds to a growing body of research demonstrating that gender-affirming care actually does lead to better mental health outcomes for gender nonconforming patients. You're correct that we need multiple studies to demonstrate the same results before we can identify a phenomenon as "evidence-based," but we do have quite a few of these studies already. If you read the article itself in Pediatrics, it cites a healthy body of research supporting positive outcomes through gender-affirming care: https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2020/01/21/peds.2019-1725

The other way this study makes a contribution is by showing what was not associated with pubertal blockers: suicidality. So even with cross-sectional data, the lack of an association means we can be relatively certain that prescribing pubertal blockers to gender non-conforming patients will not increase their risk of suicide.