Kaleidoscope 2009 wk 47

Kaleidoscope is a new series, with a “kaleidoscope” of facts, findings, views and news gathered over the last 1-2 weeks.

Most items originate from Twitter, my Google Reader (RSS) and sometimes real articles (yeah!).

I read a lot, I bookmark a lot, but only some of those things end op in a post. Since tweets have a half-life of less than a week, I thought it would be nice to safeguard some of the tweets in a post. For me to keep, for you to read.

I don’t have the time and the discipline to post daily about health news and social media as Ves Dimov does. It looks more like the compilation at blogs of dr Shock’s (see example),  dr Bates shout-outs, Health Highlights of Highlight HEALTH and Rachel Walden’s Womens health News Round-ups, but less on one subject and less structured. It will just be a mix of old and new, Social Media and science, just a kaleidoscope. Or a potpourri  if you like.

I don’t know if this kaleidoscope will live a long live. I already wrote 2 3 4 5 6 editions, but didn’t have the time to finish them. Well, we will see, just enjoy this one.

Ooh and the beautiful kaleidoscope is made by RevBean and is called: Eyeballs divide like cells. Looks very much like the eyeball-bubblewrap of a previous post but that is thus coincidence. Here is the link (Flickr, CC)

Medical Grand Rounds

Louise Norris at Colorado Health Insurance Insider is this week’s host of Grand Rounds.(see here). There are many interesting posts again. As a mother of two teens I especially liked the insight Nancy Brown of Teen Health 411 brings us into what teens want when it comes to their relationships with their parents and the “would you rather…?” story that Amy Tenderich of Diabetes Mine shares with us. The punch line is great. Her 9 year old melts my heart.

At InsureBlog’s Hank Stern brings us an article about a British hospital that will no longer admit expectant mothers with a BMI of more than 34, because the hospital’s labor and delivery unit is not equipped to handle complicated births. Hank concludes: “Fear not, though, portly preggies have to travel but 20 miles to the next closest facility. Assuming, of course, that they can make it that far when contractions are minutes apart.”

Dr Charles of the The Examining Room wrote an in depth article about a cheerleader who was supposedly stricken with dystonia following a seasonal flu vaccine in August. Dr Charles not only highlights why (specialists) think it is not dystonia, but gives also background information about the efficacy of vaccins.

Recent editions of the Grand Rounds were at CREGRL, flight nurse (link), NonClinicalJobs (link) and Codeblog, tales of a nurse (link). You can always find previous and upcoming hosts at the Grand Rounds Archive at Blogborygmi.

Breast cancer screening

The update of the 2002 USPSTF recommendation statement on screening for breast cancer in the general population, published in the November issue of The Annals of Internal Medicine has led to heated discussions in the mainstream media (i.e. New York Times and MedPage Today). Based on current evidence, partly based on 2 other articles in the same journal (comparison screening schedules and an systematic review) the guidelines advise scaling back of the screening. The USPSTF recommends:

• against routine screening mammography in women aged 40 to 49 years
• against routine screening mammography of women 75 years or older.
• biennial (instead of annual) screening mammography for women between the ages of 50 and 74 years.
• against teaching breast self-examination (BSE).
• against either digital mammography or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) instead of film mammography as screening modalities.

The two articles published in Ann Intern Med add to the evidence that the propagation of breast cancer self exam doesn’t save lives (see Cochrane review discussed in a previous post) and that the benefits of routine mammography in the young (<50) or old (>75) do not outweigh the harm (also covered by a  Cochrane review before). Indeed, as put forward by Gary Schwitzer at Schwitzer health news blog this is NOT a new debate. He refers to Slate who republishes a five-year old piece of Amanda Schaffer that does a good job of explaining the potential harms of screening. However it is difficult for women (and some doctors) to understand that “When it comes to cancer screening, more isn’t always better.” Indeed -as Kevin Pho at Kevin MD states, the question is whether “patients will accept the new, evidence-based, breast cancer screening guidelines”.

In the Netherlands it is already practice to start biannual routine mammography at the age of 50. The official breast cancer screening site of the RIVM even states that the US is now going to follow the Dutch guidelines 😉 (one of assessed guidelines in one the Ann Intern Med papers is Dutch). But people still find the  long established guidelines difficult to accept: coincidentally I saw tweets today asking to sign a petition to advance the age of screening ‘because breast cancer is more and more frequently observed at young age…(??)’ Young, well educated, women are very willing to sign…

No time to read the full articles, but interested to know more, then listen to the podcast of this Ann Intern Med edition:

Systematic Reviews, pharma sponsored trials and other publishing news

Cochrane reviews are regarded as scientifically rigorous, yet a review’s time to publication can be affected by factors such as the statistical significance of the findings. A study published in Open Medicine examined the factors associated with the time to publication of Cochrane reviews. A change in authors and updated reviews were predictive factors, but the favorability of the results was not.

Roy Poses of the Health Care Renewal Blog starts this blogpost as follows: “Woe to those of us who have been advocates for evidence-based medicine”. He mainly refers to a study published in the NEJM, that identified selective outcome reporting for trials of off-label use of gabapentin: for 8 of the 12 published trials, there was a disagreement between the definition of the primary outcome in the protocol and that in the published report. This seriously threatens the validity of evidence for the effectiveness of off-label interventions. Roy was surprised that the article didn’t generate much media attention. The reason may be that we have been overwhelmed by manipulation of data, ghostwriting and by the fact that pharma-sponsored trials rarely produce results that are unfavorable to the companies’ product (see previous posts about Ghostwriting (Merck/Elsevier, Conflict of Interest in Cancer Studies and David Tovey about Cochrane Reviews). At least two authors of the NEJM review (Bero and Dickersin) have repeatedly this to be the case [e.g. see here for an overview, and papers of Lisa Bero]. It is some relief that at least 3 of the 4 NEJM authors are also members of the Cochrane Collaboration. Indirectly better control of reporting, i.e. by clinical trials registries, can improve the reliability of pharma sponsored trials and thus systematic reviews summarizing them. As a matter of fact Cochrane authors always have to check these registries.

At Highlight Health Walter Jessen writes about Medical Journal Conflict of Interest Disclosure and Other Issues, which also discusses how money can taint objectivity in scientific publishing. Half of the post discusses the book The Trouble with Medical Journals, written in 2007 by Richard Smith, the former editor of the BMJ.
By the way, Walter just hosted MedLibs Round with the theme “Finding Credible Health Information Online”.

Good news in the Netherlands: right after international Open Access week and the launching of the Dutch Open Access website (www.openaccess.nl), the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) has announced that it is in favor of Open Access. (via PLOS-facebook).

The open access nature of PLOS itself gets out of hand: they even peer-review T-shirts (according to Bora Zivkovic of a Blog around the Clock, see here)

Other Health & Science News:

Medline Plus summarizes an article in the Journal of Nutrition, that states that Selenium supplements, may pose a heart risk.

Even Folic Acid and vitamin B12, when taken in large doses, have been reported to Increase Cancer Risk (WebMD)

Luckily WebMD also reports that dark chocolate seems to help against stress, that is it reduced stress hormones in the blood. However @evidencematters and @NHSChoices cast doubt on that :  “Chocolate cuts stress, says newspaper. Does the study really say that? And who paid for the study?…”

Scientists made the unexpected discovery (published in Molecular Cell) that BRAF, which is linked to around 70 per cent of melanomas and seven per cent of all cancers, is in fact controlled by a gene from the same RAF family called CRAF – which has also been linked to the disease. For the first time it is shown “how two genes from the same ‘family’ can interact with each other to stop cancer in its tracks” (Source: Info Cancer Research UK)

For the first time, scientists have successfully used exome sequencing to quickly discover a previously unknown gene responsible for Miller syndrome, a rare disorder. The finding demonstrates the usefulness of exome sequencing in studying rare genetic disorders. The exome is enriched for coding (thus functional) DNA, it is only 1% of the total DNA, but contains 85% of the mutations (Published in Nature Genetics, source: PhysOrg.com)

Web 2.0

For information regarding the FDA hearings on internet and social media see #FDASM: http://www.fdasm.com.

Read Write Web summarizes the new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank that indicate that reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks.

Twitter has began to relaunch the new retweet feature, although not without controversy. What do you think about the newest feature?

The Next Web gives an overview of which Twitter application is hot and which is not.

And Finally: Top 100 tools for learning, compiled by Jane Hart from the contributions of 278 learning professionals worldwide. You can see the lists here (HT: http://blogs.netedu.info/?p=1005)

The web 2.0 part is relatively short, but it is time to conclude this edition. Till next time!

Related articles by Zemanta

MEDLIB’s ROUND 1.6 (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)

Tool Talk: quick links re Facebook, GReader and GWave (socialfish.org)