They haven’t looked at anything like how the children are doing in school, and they haven’t followed them up after the end of treatment to see if any gains are maintained.

It’s a bit like me telling you that I have an amazing magic potion to make your vegetable patch grow twice as fast. To believe me, you would want to wait a few months & see how big the vegetables were, not just agree when I said ‘look, the soil is much darker, they will grow better now’.

Even if the rest of the study had been well carried out with an appropriate control group, this would still not provide a definitive answer. As it is then they’ve designed a study of nearly 1000 children so badly that it can’t actually show anything useful. That takes a special kind of genius.

If DORE works, they are stopping useful treatment getting to children by wasting time on shoddy research. If it doesn’t work, then hiding poor results behind shoddy study design is cynical at best. Either way, this is one to get angry about. They’ve got a duty to their participants, the research community, and the public, to do better than this.