Evidence based content for medical articles on Wikipedia?

Reblogged from ScienceRoll:

I would love to get your feedback on a project I just came across on Wikipedia, the WikiProject Medicine/Evidence based content for medical articles on Wikipedia. The organizer of the project is the same as in Cochrane Students' Journal Club. Please sign up if you are interested in helping us out.

Wikipedia has been accepted world wide as a source of information by both lay people and experts.

Read more… 106 more words

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In Clinical Trials About Half Of New Treatments Perform Better Than Existing Treatments

the-cochrane-library (Photo credit: Wiley Asia Blog)

 

From the 18 October 2012 article at Medical News Today

 

On average, new treatments perform better in clinical trials only slightly more often than existing treatments, according to a new systematic review published in The Cochrane Library. The fact that experimental treatments are not more effective may seem disappointing, but the authors of the review say their findings satisfy an important ethical requirement for clinical trials.

Randomised trials compare the effects of one treatment to another. In a randomised trial patients are randomly allocated to different treatment groups to ensure that like will be compared with like. When a new treatment is being tested, it is hoped or even expected that it will be better than the established treatment with which it is being compared. These expectations lead to an ethical dilemma. If the researchers already know that one treatment is better, they would be knowingly allocating some people to an inferior treatment. If randomised trials are to be ethical, therefore, only half of new treatments should turn out to be better than existing ones.

 

Related Resources

 

• Cochrane Reviews
  

 

Cochrane Reviews are systematic reviews of primary research in human health care and health policy, and are internationally recognised as the highest standard in evidence-based health care. They investigate the effects of interventions for prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. They also assess the accuracy of a diagnostic test for a given condition in a specific patient group and setting. They are published online in The Cochrane Library.

 

• Browse Free Summaries

  Looking for the full text of these Cochrane Reviews? They may be available at your local public, academic, and medical libraries.  Call ahead and ask for a reference librarian. Many academic and medical libraries do serve the public, providing at least some basic services.

• ClinicalTrials.gov

 

ClinicalTrials.gov is a registry and results database of publicly and privately supported clinical studies of human participants conducted around the world.

• How to find results of studies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[Reblog with additional resources/related articles] Focus on screening tests

 

[Reblog from HealthNewsReviewBlog, 20 July 2012]
3
I’m off to the Rockies next week to speak at and participate in The Rocky Mountain Workshop on How to Practice Evidence-Based Health Care at the invitation of Dr. Andy Oxman of theNorwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services in Oslo.

This is the 14th annual workshop but this will be my first. I’ve always heard wonderful things about it from past participants - journalists, policymakers and public health professionals.

One of this year’s workshop themes will be screening tests – which any reader of this blog knows is a favorite topic of mine.

The organizers state:

The five-day workshop is an intense, hands-on learning experience that uses a small-group, problem-based approach to learning.

One of the small groups, supported by the NIH Office of Disease Prevention, will focus on using evidence to inform and improve reporting, policy decisions, public health decisions, clinical and personal decisions about screening.

Meantime, on the topic of screening, I finally read Alan Cassels’ book, “Seeking Sickness:  Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease.“  Alan published the Canadian equivalent of our HealthNewsReview.org project – the Canadian Media Doctor site. He’s let that project gather some dust while he works on other things like this book.  I can’t quite seem to ever find time for my book idea because I’m so married to this site.  Maybe he’s wiser. It seems impossible to do both.

Related Resources

• Screening and Testing (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)
• Early Disease Detection (eMedicine Health)
• Health Screening (MedlinePlus)

 

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Is summertime bringing new wave of ads for artificial knees?

Knee replacement (Photo credit: Mundoo)

By  Gary Schwitzer in health care marketing, Medical devices at HealthNewsReview.org (6 June 2012)

After giving two examples of recent direct marketing advertising (to potential patients) for knee replacements he proceeds…

More than year ago I wrote about hip joint TV ads.  At that time, Naomi Freundlich wrote:

Together, hip and knee replacement surgeries already represent the largest hospital expense for Medicare. And, according to an article in Time magazine, the money spent on these two procedures is expected to reach $65.2 billion by 2015.

There is no doubt that part of Medicare reform will involve looking at ways to reduce this cost. One approach is to move the choice of device away from vague “physician preference” and toward evidence-based criteria…

…

he American Joint Replacement Registry was created recently, and just this January began a pilot project collecting hip and knee replacement information from 16 representative hospitals. In a statement, the organization (made up of surgeons, executives from the device industry, payers and patient representatives) said that its “long-term goal is to capture data from 90 percent of U.S. hospitals where hip and knee arthroplasty procedures are performed, which amounts to between 5,000 and 6,000 different hospitals, in the next 5 years.”

In the end, marketing devices directly to consumers is antithetical to these other measures that are designed to promote evidence-based treatments. …

…

Unless insurers—both public and private—start using evidence-based decision making to set coverage for new hip implant devices, the number of younger patients undergoing more expensive procedures will likely rise—sometimes for the wrong reasons.

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Evidence Based Medicine not the Holy Grail??

And don’t miss the lively discussion at the end of the article..

When self-evident truth in medicine is systematically ignored (KevinMD.com article of June 3, 2012)

Some things in medicine are obvious.  Despite the endless worship of ‘evidence-based’ medicine, and the constant barrage of studies on every conceivable topic, we do certain things because we know they just seem right.  I take as evidence the fact that we daily try to save lives, devoting research time, untold gazillions of  dollars and heroic clinical effort to our continued goal of staving off death.  Why is this?  Do we know that death is inherently worse than life?  Well, since we can’t see beyond the grave, and can’t exactly engage in double-blind, placebo controlled studies about the after-life, the answer is “no.” But we assume that life is preferable to death, based on our feelings, our sense of the thing.

 

The same is true in our personal lives.  No one can show me a scientific study that details why he or she married a particular person.  No one can offer up a mole of affection for empiric analysis.  And yet, we don’t doubt the existence of romance, or the reality of love.

And yet, medicine is filled with situations in which “self-evident truth” is systematically ignored, and those who believe in it intentionally and often viciously marginalized.

For example, after years of being told that physicians weren’t giving enough treatment for pain, and after years of clinicians saying, “yes we are, and too many people are addicted and abusing the system,” the data from CDC says that far too many are dying from prescription narcotics, far too many infants being born addicted, and far too many people, young and old, are using analgesics and other drugs not prescribed for them.  To which many of us say, “duh!”

And then there’s the customer service model, the thing which causes clinicians to lose their jobs as satisfaction scores fall due to disgruntled patients (often upset over not receiving the drug they desired … see above paragraph).  This is a darling of administrators.  And it clearly has flaws…

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American Geriatrics Society Updated Beers Criteria for Potentially Inappropriate Medication Use in Older Adults

Tablets and Patches of Clonidine, Comprimés et patch transdermique de clonidine (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the  April 2012 Full Text Report summary (with link to report)

Potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) continue to be prescribed and used as first-line treatment for the most vulnerable of older adults, despite evidence of poor outcomes from the use of PIMs in older adults. PIMs now form an integral part of policy and practice and are incorporated into several quality measures. The specific aim of this project was to update the previous Beers Criteria using a comprehensive, systematic review and grading of the evidence on drug-related problems and adverse drug events (ADEs) in older adults. This was accomplished through the support of The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and the work of an interdisciplinary panel of 11 experts in geriatric care and pharmacotherapy who applied a modi- fied Delphi method to the systematic review and grading to reach consensus on the updated 2012 AGS Beers Criteria. Fifty-three medications or medication classes encompass the final updated Criteria, which are divided into three categories: potentially inappropriate medications and classes to avoid in older adults, potentially inappropriate medications and classes to avoid in older adults with certain diseases and syndromes that the drugs listed can exacerbate, and finally medications to be used with caution in older adults. This update has much strength, including the use of an evidence-based approach using the Institute of Medicine standards and the development of a partnership to regularly update the Criteria. Thoughtful application of the Criteria will allow for (a) closer monitoring of drug use, (b) application of real-time e-prescribing and interventions to decrease ADEs in older adults, and (c) better patient outcomes.

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The Guide to Community Preventive Services: What Works to Promote Health

The Guide to Community Preventive Services  is a great resource for what methods and interventions work well to improve public health. It is geared towards public health officials, researchers, and policy makers. However, it is also a good aid for anyone looking for the best way(s) to address issues touching family members and friends. The information can be used to promote or advocate for changes in policies and laws at local or national levels. They can be used to positively influence changes for the better in schools, workplaces, public health departments, and more.

A good way to start is through the Topics link at the top of the page. It includes links to issues as asthma, cancer, diabetes, nutrition, obesity, vaccines, and violence. Each topic includes links to more information on the topic and related topics.
Many topics have summaries of recommendations and findings. For example the topic Diabetes includes recommendations for certain disease management programs but insufficient evidence for self management programs in school settings or worksites.

All information on the interventions for a specific topic (as violence, diabetes, alcoholism) is carefully reviewed through a standardized step by step process.  systematic reviews. Each reviews includes summarized results of all related evidence.  These unbiased evidence-based reviews are also called systematic reviews.
[Click here for a good explanation of the systematic review process]

Each topic in this community guide answer questions  such as: c

• What interventions have and have not worked?
• In which populations and settings has the intervention worked or not worked?
• What might the intervention cost? What should I expect for my investment?
• Does the intervention lead to any other benefits or harms?
• What interventions need more research before we know if they work or not?

Click on these tabs at the top of the  home page for additional information

• Use the community guide for an overview,  listing of topics, and subscribing to email updates
• Methods for explanations of systematic and economic reviews
• Resources as
  • Publications by and about this task force
  • Slides to help tell others about this guide
  • Outreach materials as a flyer, a bookmark and a table tent
  • A glossary
  • News and a comprehensive About Us sections

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UK Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) announces new partnership with PubMed Health

CRD announces new partnership with PubMed Health.

From the 9 December press release (at Eureka News Alert)CRD announces new partnership with PubMed Health

A new partnership between the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) at the University of York and PubMed Health is launched today.

PubMed Health is a new online service provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) – the world’s largest medical library. The service provides summaries and full text of selected systematic reviews and also provides information for consumers and clinicians based on those reviews

Systematic reviews are widely recognised as reliable sources of information about the effects of healthcare interventions. But as with individual research studies, they can be hard to find, may have flaws and can be difficult to interpret.

Since 1994, CRD has been producing and maintaining DARE, a database which uniquely provides access to over 11,000 abstracts of quality assessed and critically appraised systematic reviews. The database has become a key resource for health professionals and policy makers as it provides its users with a ‘bottom line’ on the overall validity and reliability of each review.

The new partnership involves CRD providing DARE content to PubMed Health.

Deputy Director of CRD Dr Amanda Sowden said: “CRD aims to produce and disseminate high quality evidence to inform health care decision making in the UK and internationally. Our partnership with PubMed Health is an exciting and prestigious development that will help give our database content truly global reach.”

 

—————

and…from the NLM (US National Library of Medicine’s December Technical Bulletin)

Update — PubMed Health December 2011 Release

With its December release, PubMed® Health grows to over 18,000 systematic reviews and health technology assessments in the last 10 years. With the inclusion of the Database of Reviews of Effects (DARE) from the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination in England, PubMed Health is getting close to comprehensive coverage of reliable systematic reviews on clinical effectiveness.

Other new features and content additions in this release include:

• Evidence-based, regularly updated information on cancer for consumers and health professionals from the National Cancer Institute (NCI®) Physician Data Query (PDQ®) database.
• Two full-text books under “Understanding research results” from the “Understand clinical effectiveness” tab:

  Irwig L, et al. Smart Health Choices: Making Sense of Health Advice. London: Hammersmith Press; 2008. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK63638/

  Evans I, et al. Testing Treatments: Better Research for Better Healthcare. 2nd edition. London: Pinter & Martin; 2011. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK66204/

• Simplified and broadened — display of medical encyclopedia search results.

Addition of Over 12,000 Reviews from DARE

A new section in the “Contents” drop-down box on the homepage has been added for the DARE reviews (see Figure 1). This new content type rounds out PubMed Health’s coverage of systematic reviews on clinical effectiveness in the published biomedical literature, joining over 4,500 Cochrane reviews and hundreds of systematic reviews by health technology assessment agencies.

Figure 1: Contents drop-down box.

DARE is a key database produced by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) and funded by England’s National Institute of Health Research. Information specialists at CRD regularly search an extensive group of electronic databases, supplemented by hand searching, to identify published systematic reviews that meet their set of scientific criteria.

For about half of the reviews that qualify for DARE, a CRD summary with critical appraisal of the scientific quality of the review is added. These may raise caveats about the reliability of the review, as in the example featured in Figure 2.

PubMed Health displays the title of the review and its citation (see #1 in Figure 2). For those reviews with a full CRD summary and appraisal, the conclusion is then displayed, followed by a link to the complete version (see #2 in Figure 2). This is followed by the abstract of the review itself, if one is included in PubMed (see #3 in Figure 2).

Figure 2: Example of a DARE review with CRD summary.

Each PubMed Health record from DARE includes a link to an explanation of CRD’s process and assessment criteria.

Currently, DARE is added to weekly, and new records and summaries will appear shortly afterward in PubMed®Health. The records will not yet appear in PubMed.

Changes to Display of Search Results

DARE reviews are returned with all results, and can also be viewed under their own content type (see #1 in Figure 3).

Medical encyclopedia content has been simplified, with some content text also appearing (see #2 in Figure 3). Previously, only medical encyclopedia content for diseases and drugs were shown on the search results page. Relevant medical encyclopedia content for procedures and other types of searches now display.

The parallel “Clinical Queries” filter search for systematic reviews in PubMed remains (see #3 in Figure 3). This search continues to return results chronologically.

Figure 3: Search results.

NCI cancer information for patients and health professionals appears under the “For consumers” and “Clinical Guides” links, respectively.

Twitter followers can learn more about PubMed Health content and additions by following @PubMedHealth.

By Hilda Bastian
National Center for Biotechnology and Information

Patients want to understand the medical literature (with links to resources for patients)

http://medicalcenter.osu.edu/patientcare/library_for_health_information/Pages/index.aspx

From the Science Intelligence blog item

Findings of a recent  study by JISC:

Publishing a lay summary alongside every research article could be the answer to assisting in the wider understanding of health-related information. 

Patients Participate! asked patients, the public, medical research charities and the research community, ‘How can we work together in making sense of scientific literature, to truly open up research findings for everyone who is interested?’ The answer came from patients who explained that they want easy-to-understand, evidence-based information relating to biomedical and health research. 

Some universities now offer researchers training in communicating with lay audiences. (…)

JISC believes that publicly-funded research should be made available for everyone and be easy to find. JISC funded this work to show how making access to scientific literature enables citizen-patients to participate in the research process, therefore providing mutual understanding and better links between scientists, medic, patients and the general public.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2011/10/participate.aspx

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“Summaries for Patients” and other plain language summaries help patients and others understand medical studies and guidelines

“Summaries for Patients

“Summaries for Patients” are brief, non-technical summaries of studies and clinical guidelines published inAnnals of Internal Medicine. The Summaries aim to explain these published articles to people who are not health care providers.

• Summaries about studies describe how researchers did the published study and what they found.
• Summaries about clinical guidelines describe the official recommendations for patient care developed by official groups such as the US Preventive Services Task Force or the American College of Physicians.

To search for summaries, click on New Search (top of middle column) at “Summaries for Patients”
Once at the New Search Page (http://www.annals.org/search), be sure to check Summaries for Patients , under Limit Results by Section (Articles Published After 1927)

Here are excerpts from a recent Summaries for Patients, Who Reports Having More Pain at the End of Life?

What is the problem and what is known about it so far?

Pain at the end of life is everyone’s great fear, but we still do not know enough about what makes pain worse at the end of life. Studies of pain near death have mostly looked at specific types of patients, such as those with cancer or those who are in a hospice program in which a patient’s comfort and reducing pain is a main focus of care. Other studies have asked family members about their deceased or dying relative’s experience of pain in the last months of life, but these reports are affected by their feelings about the pain of their loved one. In addition, studies have generally not examined patients from national surveys that offer broader understanding of patients’ experience of moderate to clinically significant pain at the end of life.

What did the researchers find?

Among the more than 4700 patients in the study, about 25% had clinically significant pain. However, the proportion experiencing significant pain increased to nearly 50% in the last 4 months before death. One of the most important things that affected the amount of pain was having arthritis. Surprisingly, the reason that a person was dying, such as heart disease or cancer, was not associated with important differences in the amount of pain.

What were the limitations of the study?

No information about treatment for pain was provided, and the study did not follow specific patients over time to see how their pain changed. Some people with arthritis might have had pain from something else that they mistakenly thought was arthritis.

What are the implications of the study?

Physicians and patients are not good at knowing when death is close, so it is important long before the last few months of life to discuss pain and ways to reduce it. Arthritis may be an important cause of pain or death that could be reduced by lifestyle changes long before death.

patientINFORM plain language summary Web sites are provided by participating publishers to help patients or their caregivers more fully understand the implications of research and to provide links to the full text of research articles they’ve selected from participating journals. The publishers allow readers following links from patientINFORM material on the health organizations’ sites to access the full text of these articles without a subscription, and they provide patients and caregivers with free or reduced-fee access to other articles in participating journals.

• American Cancer Society (News Center)
• American Association for the Advancement of Science  (Eureka Alert- Medicine and Health)
• American Diabetes Association (Access: Diabetes Research)
• American Heart Association
• Lupus Foundation of America (Research Summaries)
• National Breast Cancer Coalition
• National Organization for Rare Disorders
• American Society of Hematology Articles for patients from the ASH education book can be accessed via the patient section of ASH’s web site under Other Resources.
• Journal of Rehabilitation Research and DevelopmentFor its nontechnical readers (e.g., veterans, patients, and caregivers), JRRD publishes plain-language summaries in each issue that describe the purpose and explain who may benefit from the research. These summaries are useful tools that keep patients and interested individuals informed of current research and encourage discussion of research between patients and their healthcare providers.

The Cochrane Collaboration

Working together to provide the best evidence for health care

Cochrane Collaboration provides systematic reviews of the strongest evidence available about healthcare interventions (as drugs and medical procedures).  It does not cover all interventions, but those covered were reviewed  in-depth by experts in the medical and library fields.
The main activity of the Collaboration is the preparation of Cochrane reviews that are published electronically in successive issues of The Cochrane Library. These Cochrane reviews investigate the effects of interventions for prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. They also assess the accuracy of a diagnostic test for a given condition in a specific patient group and setting.
[Click here to find more information about the use of the evidence to inform decision making in health care ]

Here is how to find plain language  and audio summaries of Cochrane reviews

• Go to the Cochrane Collaboration home page and scroll down to Browse Free Summaries.
  Topics include Breast Cancer, Dementia and Cognitive Improvement, and Complementary Medicine.
• Click on To the Cochrane Library in the upper right corner of the Cochrance Collaboration home page.
  This Cochrane Library search page has a Help page , and an Advanced Search option.
  
  

Related Blog Items 

• How to read a research paper (and also understand medical/health news items)

Cannot find a plain language summary with the above resources?

Consider asking a reference librarian for help at your local public, academic, or hospital library. Many academic and hospital libraries provide at least limited reference service to the public.
Call or email them for information about their services.

You may also contact me at jmflahiff@msncom.  I will do my best to reply within 48 hours.

What happened to the art of medicine?

Image via Wikipedia

by SHARON BAHRYCH, PA-C, MPH at a November posting at KevinMD.com

The art of medicine, the most important part of medicine, involves several components:

1. Caring for patients, showing honest concern and compassion
2. Giving patient’s time, not rushing in and out of the exam clinic room, being patient with them, having a great bedside manner
3. Using the evidence based medicine algorithms as a guideline, as we apply them to each and every patient we see.  Understanding that every patient is an individual who has individual circumstances that affect their lives
4. Helping every patient to acquire the best outcome they can for themselves by working with them, educating them, coming up with a mutually agreed upon plan of action

Evidence based medicine does not teach us how to apply them to the patients we see, only the art of medicine does that.   [Flahiff's emphasis] Much unlike evidence based medicine we don’t learn the art of medicine in a classroom.  We learn the art of medicine by seeing patients, one by one, year after year.  As new research comes out and the evidence based medicine algorithms change, hopefully we have refined our art of medicine skills to such a fine point that we have attained the stature of a wise mentor….

Read the entire article

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