Even when it is localised and resectable, cancer of the pancreas is almost always lethal. This German trial of post-operative gemcitabine has been going on since 1998 and has proved that this type of chemotherapy prolongs disease-free survival by a worthwhile amount, though in the final analysis patients given the treatment survived a median 22 […]
Another paper about gene signatures in cancer cells: a couple of weeks ago it was in non-small-cell lung cancer, and here it’s in breast cancer. This expensive new form of prognostic stratification has yet to work its way into studies of clinical relevance. […]
Gosh, the BMJ is suddenly full of interesting articles. I must skim past them all or I shall start sounding like a creep. I shall confine myself, by long tradition, to curmudgeonly remarks on the boring bits (the clinical papers). […]
An upbeat “natural history modelling study […]
87 The story of HIV infection over the last 25 years has shed light on every aspect of medicine and its political context in our time. For most Africans and Indians it is still a death sentence: for Danes aged 25 and without hepatitis C virus, it reduces life expectancy (statistically) from 51 years to […]
A fragment ?from Sippar, c 1700 BCE Tablet iii The alewife spoke to him, to Gilgamesh, “Gilgamesh, where do you roam? […]
This is a species of grass found around the Northern hemisphere, known in Ireland as “holy grass […]
Clopidogrel is a mongrelly sort of name, with some speakers emphasising the dog and others the clopido. It is of course very widely used by cardiologists, especially to prevent occlusion after coronary stenting. […]
One respondent to my “Nightmare in NEJM Street […]
This issue of the new-style BMJ is full of well-presented interesting material, but as I’ve already said, none of it is original clinical research. […]