Home › Science & debate › Bränström 2019 — correcting update

Bränström 2019 — correcting update

In 2019 Bränström and Pachankis published in The American Journal of Psychiatry a Swedish population study whose abstract concluded that gender-affirming surgery was associated with a reduction in mental-health care utilisation.

Original claim

In 2019 Bränström and Pachankis published in The American Journal of Psychiatry a Swedish population study whose abstract concluded that gender-affirming surgery was associated with a reduction in mental-health care utilisation.

2020 correction

After reanalysis by independent researchers and at the request of the editorial board, the authors published a correction in 2020. The corrected analysis found no statistically significant difference in mental-health outcomes between the treated and untreated groups.

Significance

The case is often cited as an illustration of the difficulty of making causal claims about the effectiveness of gender-affirming interventions on the basis of observational data.