- New personal record of desk rejects 🥳 I am taking a note of journals that take over a month for the desk 📖 It is also a unusual situation where pretty much everything has been already reviewed at eLife on our Neuro paper (click for open reviews), now the sample size is just substantially larger.
- New paper by @njudd.com shows that an additional year of education doesn't causally affect telomere length in old age, despite many (theory) accounts arguing otherwise. It's been desk rejected by 13 journals happy to publish small 'positive' telomere studies. Sigh. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Lots of prior work has related longer telomeres to a host of positive lifestyle factors - with often the explicit hx that engaging in these behaviors will slow down biological aging (aka build a cognitive reserve).
- As mentioned by others (Rentscher et al., AnnRev, 2020) the vast majority of this work isn't even longitudinal. It is just people cross-sectionally relating telomere length to [insert your favorite IV]. Our paper is (to my knowledge) the first natural experimental design on telomeres.
- There is a serious lack of causal inference in psychology as a whole, which @pwgtennant.bsky.social & @dingdingpeng.the100.ci, among others, have been pointing at! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
- Using the largest sample of telomere length around (UK Biobank), we really find absolutely no effect from an additional year of education via a policy change. This mirrors our null finding for structural neuroimaging in Elife.
- Here, you can even see how the weight of evidence shifts across 6 different structural brain metrics related to aging when you look at educational attainment (correlational) and education from a policy change (causal).
- A similar effect happens for telomeres, yet 13 editors agreed it shouldn't get past the desk. Possibly it was seen as narrow in scope, yet education has one of the largest confounded effects with aging biomarkers. If this is happening for education... Mediterranean diets, etc watch out.
