When I started in evidence-based medicine, it was a big shock that probably the most under-researched area of health is how health practitioners should diagnose illness; i.e. “diagnostic strategies”. Individual studies and systematic reviews have focused on drugs and interventions, but it is now recognised that such reviews are also necessary to evaluate diagnostic tests. In children, clinical signs (e.g.

Read full article

The advantage of living and working in Oxford is you don’t have to travel far to meet interesting people, particularly in the field of epidemiology. Last week, I met with Mike Clarke, Director of the UK Cochrane Centre, and our wide ranging discussion turned to the recent release of the Cochrane Evidence Aid: resources for Haiti earthquake.

Read full article

If you search PubMed for articles relating to body-mass index, obesity, and mortality you will see an explosion in the number of articles in the last 5 years, as scientists try to characterise and explain the long-term effects of obesity.

Read full article

The horrors of the recent earthquake in Haiti have dominated the news media worldwide, making the UN label it as the “worst disaster it has ever faced”. Obama has enlisted the help of his two immediate Presidential predecessors (Bush and Clinton) to tackle this tragedy.

Read full article

Understanding bias in clinical studies can help identify some of the reasons why we reach the wrong conclusions about the effects of interventions. Some of the biases we will be looking out for in 2010 include:

1. Publication bias: Positive findings are more likely to be published in medical journals than negative findings (Tamiflu). Media coverage of health issues often tends to be biased towards publication of stories which will grab headlines (swine flu).

Read full article

After Christmas and in the run-up to Lent, people are often thinking about New Year’s resolutions and what to give up. One of the most common excesses that people want to address is food. This is the most common time of year to start new diets, exercise regimes and gym memberships, and yet obesity, particularly in childhood, is on the rise. The direct cost of overweight and obesity to the NHS has been estimated at over £3 billion.

Read full article

Around Christmas, we are often more aware of the scale of poverty than at other times of the year.

Read full article

Tonight channel 4 news and the BMJ have released a major story on the effects of Tamiflu. This is a must read as this is the second major systematic review to appear in the BMJ investigating the evidence underpinning "neuraminidase inhibitors" (the class of drugs including Tamiflu) for preventing and treating influenza in healthy adults.

Read full article

In the first article in this series we looked at the dimension of risk. Expression of risk in terms of an unwanted outcome or event can be described with descriptions or distinctions based on both its quality or on its quantity. The probability can be described in qualitative terms such as rare or infrequent or expressed quantitatively such as 1 in 1000. What is important to acknowledge that patients differ in what they like.

Read full article

South Africa, with a population of 50 million, has nearly 6 million people infected with HIV — more than any other country in the world. AIDS-related diseases kill nearly 1,000 South Africans every day.

Read full article