Probing patterns for prognostic potential

The challenge to disentangle age and recovery effects in research focusing on adolescent anorexia nervosa

“…Regarding this strategy, Levine [2] suggests focusing on the interaction contrast (acAN vs. HC acAN ) vs. (recAN vs. HC recAN ), where an effect driven by acAN vs. HC acAN but not recAN vs. HC recAN would support our interpretation (Fig. 1b in Levine (2022)). However, we found moderate evidence for the null-hypotheses of the contrast recAN vs. HC recAN using Bayesian statistics, indicating that these groups are not meaningfully different from each other.…”

“…Regarding this strategy, Levine [ 2 ] suggests focusing on the interaction contrast (acAN vs. HC acAN ) vs. (recAN vs. HC recAN ), where an effect driven by acAN vs. HC acAN but not recAN vs. HC recAN would support our interpretation (Fig. 1b in Levine (2022)).…”

“…There are several approaches with potential to address this challenge, which we discuss in the following. In this context we also address the criticism raised by Levine [2].…”

“…The authors of Boehm et al [ 1 ] thank Levine [ 2 ] for the feedback to the recently published article in Translational psychiatry. Here, we would like to present our position to the two main points raised: 1) the appropriate statistical method to account for the age effect and 2) the potential of the representational similarity analysis (RSA) for the research question presented in Boehm et al [ 1 ].…”

“…With respect to the second point raised by Levine [ 2 ], we share the enthusiasm for RSA as a valuable approach to characterize multiple neural representations by distance measures of response patterns to describe a neural process. The procedure Levine [ 2 ] has proposed to support our tentative interpretation in Boehm et al [ 1 ] sounds very interesting indeed. However, we would like to emphasize that the study design as presented in Boehm et al [ 1 ] is not well-suited for this approach.…”