JAMA 12 Jan 2011 Vol 305 151 “Behavioral Therapy With or Without Biofeedback and Pelvic Floor Electrical Stimulation for Persistent Postprostatectomy Incontinence: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” As so often with titles like this, you have to explore the text before you can tell what the study is really about. In the UK, “behavioural therapy” usually […]
JAMA 5 Jan 2011 Vol 305 43 Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators are a good intervention for those who have bad systolic heart failure with a risk of ventricular arrhythmia, and would rather die slowly than suddenly. The “utility” of the device is that it can have a statistically significant effect on mortality in younger, properly selected patients; […]
NEJM 30 Dec 2010 Vol 363 2588 A sizeable multinational study seeks to find out whether providing free daily anti-retroviral drugs as well as free condoms might help to reduce the transmission of human immunodeficiency virus in men who have sex with men. The majority of the subjects were recruited in Peru, with smaller groups […]
JAMA 22-29 Dec 2010 Vol 304 2732 “Professionalism may not be sufficient to drive the profound and far-reaching changes needed in the care system, but without it, the health care enterprise is lost.” Britons, take heed! This “special communication” was written by a social scientist and five doctors to inform the debate about American health […]
JAMA 15 Dec 2010 Vol 304 2595 New England is a wonderful place: from its little towns a nation was born, full of the idiosyncracies of seventeenth century Britain. The cadences of the 1611 Bible can still be heard in the speeches of President Obama, and even on hoardings advertising health products; miles, pints, and […]
JAMA 8 Dec 2010 Vol 304 2494 When cardiac troponin measurements came into use about a decade ago, it was immediately clear that they would change clinical practice and redefine ischaemic heart disease. By providing a simple biochemical indication of the degree of myocardial injury and death, they also provided us with a new marker […]
JAMA 1 Dec 2010 Vol 304 Eicosapentaenoic acid – which one is that? That’s right, the fishy one: all that spelling homework I made you do is paying off. More accurately, it is the omega-3 fatty acid that fish get from eating algae and deposit as liquid fat. And docosahexaenoic acid? The same again: only […]
JAMA 24 Nov 2010 Vol 304 2245 It’s a pleasure to start the week with a first class well-conducted study with a clear outcome that will benefit patients. The benefit in this case is the avoidance of futile thoracotomy for non small-cell lung cancer. And the way to avoid it is by using combined trans-oesophageal […]
JAMA 17 Nov 2010 Vol 304 Like all doctors who survived their hospital jobs in the 1970s, I have some shocking memories. Oddly enough, though, some of them are happy too, as the shocks saved lives. The woman dragged out of a freezing canal with a core temperature of 28ºC who survived intact after 16 […]
JAMA 10 Nov 2010 Vol 304 It’s not often that you see a paper in JAMA written by a real working British GP – so congratulations to Louis Levene from Leicester for an excellent study that seeks to inform US practice by showing what happens to coronary heart disease mortality in relation to the recorded […]