The recently released Cass Review Final Report (Cass Review) has criticized the absence of “high quality evidence” supporting the use of puberty blockers to treat transgender youth (as well as in other areas of transgender research).
The systemic reviews performed as part of the Cass Review applied a “modified” version of something called the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS). A brief review of several of the reviews (there are several of them) performed by the Cass team mention “modifying” the NOS, but they do not disclose the nature of the modifications made. Broadly speaking, they classify the vast majority of studies as “low quality”, while the final report spends quite a bit of time talking about “double blind” studies as the “gold standard” for high quality data.
Let’s talk about that a bit further, shall we? ( This will be one of several posts on the Cass Review Final Report)
