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 […]
For the past two months I have been trying to find somebody to speak in in favour of mammography in a debate, but I have failed. Some six people have turned me down. Why, I wonder? […]
“The most effective screening programme ever,” this was Richard Doll’s gentle jest when I was director of national screening programmes. Aware of my efforts to ensure that screening did much more good than harm, using every improvement technique I could learn from IHI, Toyota, and wherever, he would point out that the auscultation of the […]
“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. […]
The world is on the cusp of a major epidemic of breast cancer, said Peter Boyle, head of the international prevention research institute in Lyon, France, at a conference on breast cancer in Oman last weekend. The incidence of breast cancer has tripled in the past 30 years and is expected to double again by […]
I sat riveted through Kenneth Branagh’s perceptive portrayal of Ivanov in Chekhov’s eponymous play. Witnessing the desperate depression of the protagonist unfold I couldn’t help thinking how many points he would score on a Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), a common screening tool for depression in primary care and a burdensome necessity for accurate clinical coding […]