JAMA 24-31 Aug 2011 Vol 306 840 Every GP knows that some patients who are admitted to hospital come out without their usual medication and take this as an indication that they don’t need it any more. This happens particularly after admission to ICU. The team doing this cohort study in Ontario makes an attempt […]
JAMA 3 Aug 2011 Vol 306 493 This issue of JAMA is devoted to war and violence, things that most of us have not experienced. Those who do experience them, like most of the population of Europe in the generation before mine, are never unscathed. The study here discovers that military veterans with post-traumatic stress […]
Imagine you’ve just completed a groundbreaking piece of research. Do you: a) go and tell your mates down the pub; b) publish in a peer reviewed journal; or c) rush out a press release? According to legend, Crick and Watson stylishly chose “a” after they discovered the structure of DNA, strolling into The Eagle in […]
Consensus-based guidelines for transparent reporting Prediction models can provide reliable estimates of a patient’s risk (or probability) of having a specific underlying condition or of developing some condition in the future. Prediction models have consistently outperformed estimates made by individual doctors. Familiar examples include the Framingham Risk Score for cardiovascular disease, the APACHE score for […]
JAMA 20 July 2011 Vol 306 277 As I try to write, much of America lies torpid in a heat wave approaching 40 degrees centigrade. This issue of JAMA, like last week’s, seems to suffer from a sort of anticipatory heat stroke – not one of the research papers belongs in a generalist journal, and […]
Irrelevant, misdirected, inappropriate, or unnecessary. Reading the list of contents in some lesser known journals or abstracts at a conference, you wonder what some studies really add. Sir Iain Chalmers (The Lind Initiative), who opened the Society of Primary Care conference in Bristol, called it waste. He said that we need to focus on uncertainty […]
JAMA 13 July 2011 Vol 306 Unusually, I couldn’t find anything to report on from JAMA this week. Last week, its new editor, Howard Bauchner, promised us a new vision for the journal. I liked the old journal very much but it was becoming like an old jumper *– full of comfortable associations but saggy […]
Does your research really matter? Most VIP introductions are bland and unchallenging. Not this time. When (Professor Sir) Peter Gregson, vice chancellor at Queen’s University Belfast, introduced the joint summer school of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration’s centres of public health and Health Research Board (Ireland), he pointed out how universities often fail to show the […]
JAMA 6 July 2011 Vol 305 45 Of all the great writers, only Chekhov captures exactly the balance of good and evil in rural life. Before his fame as a writer, he worked in a rural hospital, making the best of what support staff he had and what competencies he had acquired as a medical […]
“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. […]