• Should doctors be forced to disclose payments and hospitality from drug companies? The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry plans to bring in a system where healthcare professionals voluntarily declare payments and hospitality received from drug companies. The issue is the subject of our latest online poll, which, at the time of writing, has […]
Category: The BMJ today
The BMJ Today: Food for thought, brain injury, and ovarian cancer
• Nutritional epidemiology As we learned this week that eating chillies could make us live longer, The BMJ’s acting head of research, Elizabeth Loder, discusses the pitfalls of nutritional epidemiology. High quality trials are scarce, and the many observational studies are prone to recall bias, as explained by John Ioannidis in a recent editorial. As now […]
The BMJ Today: An NHS in dire financial straits, sex workers, and changing attitudes to vaccines
• NHS needs urgent cash injection Barely a day seems to go by without yet another story or report spelling fresh financial doom for the NHS. Today it’s the turn of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), which has issued a stark warning that the NHS is unlikely to achieve the government’s 2020 target […]
The BMJ Today: Chillies and mortality, informed consent, and healthcare for Syrian refugees
• Is chilli good for your health? Jun Lv and colleagues report a large cohort study assessing the associations between the regular consumption of spicy foods and total and cause specific mortality. They found that the habitual consumption of spicy foods was inversely associated with total and certain cause specific mortality (cancer, ischemic heart diseases, and […]
The BMJ Today: Organ donation, sharps injuries, patient involvement, and declaring financial interests
• Organ donation—Currently in the UK, 33% of the population are registered donors, and at the end of March 2015 there were 6904 people on the waiting list for a suitable donor, with kidney transplants being the most commonly needed (5465, 79%). In our latest research article, Aubert et al study the long term outcomes of […]
The BMJ Today: Patient centred outcomes research
• A research paper looks at the association between warfarin treatment and longitudinal outcomes after ischaemic stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation in community practice, using a large registry of patients admitted to US hospitals with acute ischaemic stroke. The study found that new prescription of warfarin in patients with atrial fibrillation after stroke was associated with […]
The BMJ Today: Your summer reading medical thriller is here
The case of nutrition researcher Ranjit Kumar Chandra has attracted a news item and a blog. As Owen Dyer reports, Chandra has lost his bid to win damages from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a documentary it broadcast in 2006 which claimed that he never conducted a raft of published studies claiming the benefits of baby formula and vitamin […]
The BMJ Today: Taxing sugar doesn’t have to be taxing
Increasing evidence suggests that taxes on soft drinks, sugar, and snacks can change diets and improve health, Sirpa Sarlio-Lähteenkorva argues in The BMJ today. Arguing in favour of a sugar tax, Sarlio-Lähteenkorva says that a tax of about €1 (£0.70; $1.10) on a kilogram of sugar would “substantially reduce demand for sugar and sweets […]
The BMJ Today: Handwashing, Medicare, and radiology shortages
A severe lack of specialist radiology training is failing children in the UK, an audit by the Royal College of Radiologists has found. The audit, undertaken in July this year, discovered that 35% of children’s radiographs and scans were performed by radiographers who had not received specific training in imaging children and that a similar percentage of scans were […]
The BMJ Today: Staffing levels, Alzheimer’s disease, blood pressure variability, and otitis media
• “If staffing were a drug, doctors would be asked to prescribe it,” Margaret McCartney says in her latest column. So she thinks it is a pity that NHS England has told NICE to stop work on discovering what constitutes safe staffing levels. Simon Stevens has decided to bring the operation “in house” and is […]