Each week our editors select from over 100 journals reliable and useful evidence summarised in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. Carl Heneghan, Editor in Chief There’s a lot of research at the moment on blood pressure and what’s the right target to treat too. A JAMA systematic review looked at mortality and cardiovascular disease across blood pressure […]
In BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, Iain Chalmers and colleagues set out the Key concepts for Informed Health Choices. Carl Heneghan Shared Decision Making, according to NHS England, means patients can review all the treatment options available to them and participate actively with their healthcare professional in making that decision. The National Institute for Health and […]
Each week our editors select from over 100 journals reliable and useful evidence that we summarise in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. Carl Heneghan, Editor in Chief Evidence Watch, provides the articles likely to impact practice that our editors select: if you don’t have time to read them then access the summaries at BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine: Week beginning […]
‘blindly pursuing early detection risks subjecting a third of diagnosed women to unnecessary harm.’ Jason Oke According to research led by the Barts Cancer Institute at Queen Mary University London, screening all British women over 30 years of age could result in 17,000 fewer ovarian and 64,000 breast cancers over a lifetime. Not only […]
Originally published on BMJ Opinion Kamal R Mahtani, Tom Jefferson, and Carl Heneghan discuss: What makes a systematic review “complex”? Systematic reviews involve systematically searching for all available evidence, appraising the quality of the included studies, and synthesising the evidence into a useable form. They contribute to the pool of best available evidence, translating […]
A manifesto for Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) was published in the BMJ earlier this year and presented at Evidence Live. Jeff Aronson has been thinking again about the word manifesto. The Indo-European root MAN meant a hand. The Latin word was manus, from which we get words such as maintain, manacle, manage, manège, manicure, manipulate, […]
While the app technology is developing at a fast pace, it seems the evidence is not keeping up to say how asthma patients might use these devices. Annette Pluddemann 334 million people globally have asthma with 1 in 7 of the world’s children experiencing asthma symptoms that require lifelong management. Pulse oximeters are marketed […]
Harmful medicines sometimes stay on the market for longer than they should. When that happens, people are unnecessarily exposed to medicines that may adversely affect their health. Igho Onakpoya The benefit-harm balance of new medicines is often not fully known at the time marketing licences are granted. More information about harms often becomes apparent […]
The number of studies assessing the diagnostic accuracy of tests is growing rapidly, but many studies fail to impact on practice due to five fundamental flaws in their methods. Jack O’Sullivan Diagnostic accuracy studies aim to determine how good a new test is at diagnosing a disease compared with a current test. To do this, […]
Use of oxygen in heart attack patients has remained uncertain for over 40 years, but clinical practice has only recently caught up with the evidence. Carl Heneghan My Oxford Handbook of Acute Medicine – getting rather old now, like me – states to give oxygen in the initial management of myocardial infarction. Oxygen was routine […]