NEJM 27 Feb 2014 Vol 370 799 I’ve reached the age when people look back and sigh and cluck about the way the world has changed since they were children. In the 1950s, the world was actually a pretty nasty place, and at any moment the hydrogen bomb might bring it to an end. People […]
NEJM 20 Feb 2014 Vol 370 699 This week, the NEJM is big on bevacizumab. Amongst the crowd of mabs, this is one of the best known: Avastin is a humanized monoclonal antibody directed against vascular endothelial growth factor-A which has been on the market since 2004. It has had its ups and downs, and […]
NEJM 599 Most weeks I quote you the conclusion of some pharma-funded trial which overstates the benefit of an intervention. But in reality clinical trials of any kind can be a form of marketing: doing them is difficult work, there are reputations and ideas at stake, and the temptation to overstate results is always there for career academics as […]
NEJM 6 Feb 2014 Vol 370 513 Now that I’ve moved to a policy of including online first articles in these reviews, I’m immediately confronted with a problem: I’ve already told you about most of the content of this week’s NEJM, and there isn’t much new on the website. Never mind. Here is the companion […]
NEJM 30 Jan 2014 Vol 370 There is very little in the print journals this week, and JAMA is taking a week out, so this seems like a good opportunity to switch over to including online first papers (marked OL) in these weekly reviews. I’ve threatened to do this before but never properly crossed the […]
NEJM 23 Jan 2014 Vol 370 301 It’s hard to think of two places less alike than the icy expanses of Alaska and the hot claustrophobic depths of a South African gold mine. But back in the 1960s, people who huddled for warmth in Alaska often spread tuberculosis among themselves, and a randomised trial showed […]
NEJM 16 Jan 2014 Vol 370 201 Developing and marketing a new drug is a tricky business, but it can be a very lucrative one. AiCuris is a company I hadn’t heard of before, but it seems to specialize in antiviral drugs. For such a company, herpes simplex 2 infection presents a huge market opportunity: […]
JAMA Internal Medicine Jan 2014 Vol 174 I was amazed at the richness of the contents of JAMA Intern Med this week, but then I sadly realized that the journal has changed from being a fortnightly treat to being a monthly one. I had been warned this would happen; it’s a natural consequence of online […]
NEJM 26 Dec 2013 Vol 369 2481 There was no let up in the American journals over what they call the holiday period, and the NEJM offered a trial of a new GSK influenza vaccine to our attention on Boxing Day. It is a quadrivalent vaccine containing inactivated influenza B virus of both main lineages, […]
NEJM 19 Dec 2013 Vol 369 2379 The BMJ is alone among the journals in making any concession to festive frivolity. By contrast, the NEJM seems determined to prove that it can maintain stony-faced intellectualism at all times: its seasonal offerings begin with “Somatic Mutations of Calreticulin in Myeloproliferative Neoplasms” and “Somatic CALR Mutations in […]