It’s not often that a professor of neurology is the corresponding author of a study on the prevention of colorectal cancer and indeed this particular part of the body was not on the minds of most of those who designed the trials of aspirin which he and his colleagues analyse in this paper. […]
Category: Richard Lehman’s weekly review of medical journals
Plant of the Week: Magnolia sinensis
The magnolias were among the first of flowering trees, and in many respects they remain first for the beauty and scent of their flowers. There are three species with dangling flowers – sinensis, wilsonii, and sieboldii – and these are especially beautiful and especially scented. […]
Plant of the Week: Allium ursinum
This is has been the best week of the year for plants in England: wisterias, tree peonies, the incomparable Paeonia mlokosewiczii, the first bearded irises, and everywhere towering horse-chestnuts of white or red. But I turn to this lowly, smelly wild plant […]
Ann Intern Med 1 May 2007 Vol 146
Giant cell arteritis is not a diagnosis we make readily in general practice, though in theory it can be made on clinical grounds without the necessity of a temporal artery biopsy […]
Lancet 5 May 2007 Vol 369
Trials of education and screening in primary care tend to be labour-intensive and end up with large drop-out rates and low yields. This educational outreach and screening programme for tuberculosis in Hackney was certainly labour-intensive, and in terms of case-finding, had a low yield: […]
BMJ 5 May 2007 Vol 334
“Does tonsillectomy beat watchful waiting in adults? […]
NEJM 3 May 2007 Vol 356
For those who don’t want – or can’t remember – to take a bisphosphonate tablet once a week, there is the option of spending a quarter of an hour once a year having an infusion of zoledronic acid. […]
JAMA 2 May 2007 Vol 297
SURVIVE is not a good acronym for a trial of inotropic drugs in decompensated heart failure: if there is one certainty in cardiac pharmacology, it is that inotropic drugs never improve survival. […]
JAMA 25 Apr 2007
Do we really need a new drug for angina? I think we do, because although we already have a choice of beta-blockers, nitrates, calcium channel blockers and potassium channel activators, there will always be some patients whose angina remains hard to control, and who are not suitable for revascularisation. […]
NEJM 26 Apr 2007
This study selected patients with “bipolar depression […]