Last Wednesday I joined the BMJ as the Roger Robinson editorial registrar. This is my first despatch from the frontline of medical publishing. The registrar role has been running for 22 years and is named after the late Professor Robinson who was an associate editor at the BMJ for ten years. It’s for one year […]
Tag: bmj
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 7 March 2011
JAMA 2 Mar 2011 Vol 305 913 A friend recently began a piece on outcomes research with Bishop Joseph Butler’s maxim, “Every thing is what it is, and not some other thing.” If a trial like SOLVD is designed to measure the effect of a particular ACE inhibitor on survival in people with symptomatic left […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 28 February 2011
JAMA 23 Feb 2011 Vol 305 783 The highly prevalent custom of poisoning the osteoclasts of old ladies with bisphosphonates for years on end seems surprisingly harmless. This case-control study confirms that there is a tiny increase in the risk of subtrochanteric fracture after five years, heavily outweighed by the protective effects of these drugs […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 14 February 2011
JAMA 9 Feb 2011 Vol 305 569 If I were a woman, the things I would most fear from breast cancer surgery would be arm lymphoedema and recurrence of the cancer. Does one have to be balanced against the other? Common sense would suggest that the more axillary lymph nodes you dissect, the less likely […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 7 February 2011
JAMA 2 Feb 2011 Vol 305 487 Most of us have never come near a vial of bevacizumab, though we’ve read plenty about it, especially over recent years in the context of eye disease involving vascular proliferation. This monoclonal antibody targeting vascular endothelial growth factor A was initially developed as a treatment for solid cancers […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 31 January 2011
JAMA 26 Jan 2011 Vol 305 391 Stroke medicine grew up in the 1990s: like heart failure medicine, it shone welcome light on a large and neglected group of patients with organ damage who had been written off as unsalvageable. This was a Very Good Thing in itself, but its proponents then went on to […]
Research highlights – 28 January 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. Does vitamin D supplementation improve bone mineral density in healthy children? What are the perspectives of people living and dying with […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 24 January 2011
JAMA 19 Jan 2011 Vol 305 261 I’m of an age when the words cognitive decline in the title of a paper make me rush to read it – the exception being a self-assessment study in the BMJ a couple of years ago, which was just too scary. This paper isn’t scary; in fact it […]
Research highlights – 21 January 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. What is the association between headaches and volume of white matter hyperintensities on magnetic resonance imaging of the brain? What are […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 17 January 2011
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 […]