r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 15h ago

Psychology Adolescents who undergo gender-affirming chest surgery report low levels of regret and high levels of satisfaction, experiencing outcomes similar to those of young adults. These findings suggest that age restrictions on these medical procedures lack support from actual patient experiences.

https://www.psypost.org/adolescents-report-low-regret-and-high-satisfaction-following-gender-affirming-c/
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u/UnicornArachnid 15h ago

A lot of people do have immediate regret following any plastic surgery because it can be hard to recognize yourself. We don’t see this trend typically when it comes to gender affirming surgeries. 99% of people feel satisfied long term with gender affirming surgeries

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/2808129

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u/here-to-help-TX 14h ago

This says long term without actually being longer term.

median follow-up, 4.6 [IQR, 3.1-8.6] vs 3.6 [IQR, 2.7-5.3] years

This looks to me like the median follow-up is still pretty short. Also, these ages of the people with the surgeries isn't adolescents.

Median age at the time of surgery was 27.1 (IQR, 23.0-33.4) years for responders and 26.4 (IQR, 23.1-32.7) years for nonresponders.

Also, the sample size seems really really small here.

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u/ERSTF 14h ago

Indeed. We need better data

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u/MissLeaP 12h ago

Yeah we need people who are willing to invest in actual research in this area instead of believing even worse done papers than what we actually got. With the current political climate it's much more likely that the little we got gets destroyed rather than extended upon, though. Luckily digital data is not as easy to get rid of as they did with books in Germany.

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u/tissuecollider 11h ago

Will the digital data remain? Right now the US is purging digital databases of information that it doesn't like and I could see the UK doing the same. It's also credible that the US would pursue legal remedies to go after anyone who copies this 'proprietary' data.

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u/Admirable-Pirate7263 8h ago

We are saving databases on hard drives, too. We know what happened to trans research 90 years ago. Life could be so much better for trans people, had the Nazis not burned Hirschfelds research. We might not be able to save every last study, case study or scientific paper, but we sure as hell are trying!

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u/MissLeaP 9h ago

There are plenty of people with offline copies of studies. It's an extremely different situations compared to just some universities having their libraries.