At the annual course for new medical editors there were visitors from 25 medical journals around the world. When delegates fly in from Australia, New Zealand, and Chile, it seems like those from Sudan and Saudi Arabia are our next door neighbours. The common interest is their job – newly minted editors of specialist medical […]
Richard Smith: A woeful tale of the uselessness of peer review
Let me tell you a sad tale of wasted time and effort that illustrates clearly for me why it’s time to abandon prepublication peer review. It’s the tale of an important paper that argues that we can screen for risk of cardiovascular disease using simply age. (1) I’ve already posted a blog on the implications […]
Research highlights – 11 November 2011
“Research highlights” is a weekly round-up of research papers appearing in the print BMJ. We start off with this week’s research questions, before providing more detail on some individual research papers and accompanying articles. […]
Mike Clarke: Assessing the impact of participating in research – the need for core outcomes?
The COMET Initiative is making it easier for people to develop, identify, and use core outcome sets to improve the potential impact of research findings on healthcare practice, health, and wellbeing. But what about the challenge of assessing the potential impact of being part of a piece of research on health and wellbeing? Is there a […]
Beverly Collin: Being bold on a budget at Lille
After the initial orientation to the vast Union World Conference on Lung Health (Lille, France), I settled into a series of thought provoking sessions and symposia. There were big concerns linked to the current global economic crisis and the flatlining of funds for tuberculosis from international donors at at least two of the sessions I attended. […]
Richard Smith: Can we screen for cardiovascular disease using age alone?
Using simply age to screen for cardiovascular disease is as effective as more complicated methods using blood pressure and serum cholesterol, concludes a study published in PloS One in May by Nick Wald, Mark Simmonds, and Joan Morris. (1) Can this really be right and if so what does it mean? The authors used a Monte […]
Maham Khan: Plastic fetuses, monks, and cake
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” reads the banner greeting women as they emerge from the British pregnancy advisory service (BPAS) clinic in Bedford Square. This banner along with a handful of campaigners is part of the “40 Days for Life” campaign, a pro-life vigil praying for an end to abortion. […]
David Kerr: Connected for health – an alternative view
There are now two groups of people living with chronic disease, those that are connected and those who are not. In days gone by, “being connected” meant having personal and professional contacts in all of the right places to further an idea, career, or relationship. Being connected nowadays, however, means something completely different – owning […]
Richard Smith: Outlook bleak for mental health
Mental health disorders—particularly depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease—account for a huge proportion of the global burden of disease, but the outlook for better treatments looks bleak. I don’t think that was the message I was supposed to get from a conference entitled Making Sense of Mental Illness organised by EMBO at the European Molecular Biology […]
Julian Sheather: The fifth horseman of the apocalypse?
During the years when the Book of Revelations was being laid down, some time apparently in the first century AD, human populations were likely, with some exceptions, to be small, imperilled, and surrounded by a seemingly infinite planet. Officially at least, on October the 31st this year the population of the earth reached seven billion. […]