Research published in BMC Medicine, a position paper addressing benefits and potential harms of acid suppression gives clear indications for appropriate proton pump inhibitor (PPI) use in clinical practice. Here, Professor Carmelo Scarpignato, lead author of the paper, discusses the guideline and gives a taste of future directions.
A research article published in BMC Medicine investigates the withdrawal of anti-obesity drugs from the market because of serious adverse reactions. In this guest blog, authors Igho Onakpoya, Carl Heneghan, and Jeffrey Aronson, from the University of Oxford, discuss the poor benefit to harm balance of many anti-obesity drugs and conclude that drug companies have profited while patients who have suffered adverse reactions have lost.
Network meta-analyses are extremely useful if you want to compare the effectiveness of three or more interventions by collating both the direct and indirect evidence on a clinical question. It’s known that contracting companies often conduct network meta-analyses for the biotech and the pharmaceutical industry but until now no one has looked into what extent that this is happening and whether they are being published. Here, Ewoud Schuit and John Ioannidis discuss their research looking into this, published in Systematic Reviews, and discuss the implications of the huge underreporting that they found.
Movements towards increased transparency have resulted in more and more documents, journal publications and original datasets relating to specific clinical trials being included in a wide range of repositories. This is a great direction for the field but if we are to use these ‘data objects’ in the most effective manner, we need to establish consistency in the way they are described (and therefore searchable) across these repositories. Steve Canham and Christian Ohmann from the European Clinical Research Infrastructure Network have recently published a Methodology in Trials proposing standards for consistent descriptions of these data objects and here, both authors highlight its importance for the field and summarize their proposal.
A systematic review and meta-analysis published today in BMC Medicine reports on an association between alcohol consumption and different types of stroke. Here, author Susanna C. Larsson tells us more about the study and the possible implications of these findings.
Research recently published in BMC Medicine uses data from the World Health Survey to assess levels of physical mulitmorbidity among people with psychosis. We invited author of the study, Dr Brendon Stubbs, to tell us about the paper and the implications of their findings.
This week (19th-27th November) in the UK is Pulmonary Hypertension awareness week. The theme for this year is “Let’s talk about PH” so we thought we’d do just that by inviting Dr. Stylianos E. Orfanos, Professor of Critical Care and Medicine at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, to give us a comprehensive overview of the disease as well the current treatments available and the barriers that can prevent patients form being effectively treated.
A new review published in Burns & Trauma has suggested skin appendage-derived stem cells can play a potential role in wound repair. Here author Sha Huang tells us more about these findings.
Why do clinical trials still rely on paper-based data entry methods when there are so many technologies available to improve trial efficiency? New research published today in Trials provides a case study of integrating technology into trial design for a complex intervention and here, co-authors Cheney Drew and Vincent Poile discuss its impact on efficiency and what they see the future to hold for trial management.
With different formulae available to estimate renal function, a major mortality factor, it’s important that clinicians know which is best to use. A recently published study in BMC Medicine compares three of the formulae used to predict renal function head to head. Here author João Pedro Ferreira tells us about the study and gives us a rundown of the formulae.