Please tell me that I’m not the only one, who hearing about the magical properties of S100, CD64, microbiomology or ILx (where x >8, probably prime, and is instantly forgettable) recalls the scam of the century as told by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837. Well. There may be more to biomarkers of disease than just […]
Category: archimedes
Getting from the diamond to the drug chart
“Come out of the dark and into the light – use systematic reviews in your clinical practice.” (OK, so that’s probably NOT a direct quote.) It’s been battered on about for a while in this blog that systematic reviews give you – probably – the best idea of if a treatment, diagnostic test or prognostic […]
Clashing concepts
One thing I meet (fairly often) is the clash between the RCT and the patient ‘preference’. (I have to use ‘quotes’ because I know it’s the wrong phrase but I can’t find the right one.) Take an example – topical anaesthesia for accessing implanted central lines in children & young people with cancer. For those who […]
Evidence free yet evidence based; guidelines again.
In a paper that I’d have never seen if it wasn’t for Twitter, Loes Knaapen of the Université de Montréal Public Health Research Institute reports the scholarly musings on a bunch of conversations with ‘EBM’ guideline developers, attendance at conference events, and a lot of reading around the subject of Guideline Creation. At the heart of […]
Sleep tight
Every so often you bump into something that you didn’t know you didn’t know. That might make a massive difference to your (or someone else’s) life. Well recently I was directed at this survival guide encouraging sleep to survive shift working and do it safely and securely. For us. The key points are: […]
But what if you miss a malignancy?
There’s a big push in the UK to make ‘early diagnosis’ of cancer happen more often. The assumption is that diagnosis earlier will mean the disease has not spread, is more treatable, and will lead to a better outcome. For many conditions, the stage at presentation does indeed link to outcome. In some conditions, there’s a […]
Emergency!
That was the repeated phrase of my middle child’s obsessive bedtime reading for a while. Picture of police bikes, fire engines, ambulances, mountain rescue 4×4 and lifeboats. In not one frame was the rescued individual entered into a clinical trial of therapy or diagnostics. I guess that might have been asking a bit much, but […]
Basics: Study Type
So sometimes it’s obvious (the title says “: Randomised Controlled Trial” or “Systematic Review …”) but sometimes it’s just a bit tricky to work out what type of study you’re dealing with. The very clever folks at the AHRQ also had that – and the inconsistency of how researchers name things – and so developed […]
Whose values?
I was reading a really fascinating article about microarray-based comparative genomic hybridisation. The authors – experts in the exploration and understanding of data that looks worrying like something from The Matrix – describe the way that such powerful genetic techniques can see what might be different about one child’s genes, and suggest groups in which the technique […]
Basics: AVID
The shortcut world of acronyms for critical appraisal was lacking one for diagnostic test accuracy – we have RAMbo for RCTs, FAST for systematic reviews, but what of the poor reader of studies evaluating a new test? We know the basic idea – patients who are considered to potentially have the diagnosis in question have […]