One thing I meet (fairly often) is the clash between the RCT and the patient ‘preference’. (I have to use ‘quotes’ because I know it’s the wrong phrase but I can’t find the right one.) Take an example – topical anaesthesia for accessing implanted central lines in children & young people with cancer. For those who […]
Latest articles
Evidence free yet evidence based; guidelines again.
In a paper that I’d have never seen if it wasn’t for Twitter, Loes Knaapen of the Université de Montréal Public Health Research Institute reports the scholarly musings on a bunch of conversations with ‘EBM’ guideline developers, attendance at conference events, and a lot of reading around the subject of Guideline Creation. At the heart of […]
StatsMiniBlog: Stepped Wedge Trials
You may be wondering about the phrase “Stepped Wedge Trial” (SWT) as there haven’t been many in paediatrics. (There is quite a nice one about the provision of free school breakfasts though – showed that giving free breakfast didn’t really improve attendance, or test scores, but the children didn’t feel as hungry.) They are a […]
Guest Blog: Computer says wheeze (less)
This guest blog from Munib Haroon takes up the challenge of turning the terror of technology to good… As I write these words there is a debate currently underway about whether machine intelligence will eclipse ours in the coming decades [for one end of this debate go see James Cameron’s The Terminator] meanwhile another debate […]
Sleep tight
Every so often you bump into something that you didn’t know you didn’t know. That might make a massive difference to your (or someone else’s) life. Well recently I was directed at this survival guide encouraging sleep to survive shift working and do it safely and securely. For us. The key points are: […]
But what if you miss a malignancy?
There’s a big push in the UK to make ‘early diagnosis’ of cancer happen more often. The assumption is that diagnosis earlier will mean the disease has not spread, is more treatable, and will lead to a better outcome. For many conditions, the stage at presentation does indeed link to outcome. In some conditions, there’s a […]
Emergency!
That was the repeated phrase of my middle child’s obsessive bedtime reading for a while. Picture of police bikes, fire engines, ambulances, mountain rescue 4×4 and lifeboats. In not one frame was the rescued individual entered into a clinical trial of therapy or diagnostics. I guess that might have been asking a bit much, but […]
Basics: Study Type
So sometimes it’s obvious (the title says “: Randomised Controlled Trial” or “Systematic Review …”) but sometimes it’s just a bit tricky to work out what type of study you’re dealing with. The very clever folks at the AHRQ also had that – and the inconsistency of how researchers name things – and so developed […]
Whose values?
I was reading a really fascinating article about microarray-based comparative genomic hybridisation. The authors – experts in the exploration and understanding of data that looks worrying like something from The Matrix – describe the way that such powerful genetic techniques can see what might be different about one child’s genes, and suggest groups in which the technique […]
StatsMiniBlog: Confidence Intervals
As its summer time & thoughts of exciting summer camps expanding skills, or time spent catching up with missed opportunities, or indeed just beer & strawberries, are filling our lives it seems appropriate to go entirely left field and explore confidence intervals. Confidence intervals describe – in terms of interpretation – the range of values […]