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The journal Archives of Internal Medicine has a several cracking research papers this week. Low carb dieters are grumpier than those on low fat diets First up is Brinkworth et al.‘s research on the long-term psychological effects of low carbohydrate diets compared with low fat diets. In this study, 106 overweight and obese individuals were [...]
A study published in Archives of Internal Medicine has found that almost a third of clinical trials reported in top medical journals don’t adequately report the side effects of the intervention being tested. Pitrou et al. assessed the reporting of safety data in 133 randomised controlled trials published between January 2006 and January 2007 in [...]
I make a living reading clinical research papers and am familiar with the big picture of clinical trials – papers published, guidelines amended and practice improved. Grassroots clinical research – the work of doctors, nurses and patients undertaking a trial – has always seemed like a million miles away to me. However, I’m hoping to [...]
Not really, say two studies recently published articles in JAMA and PLoS Medicine that scrutinized studies in various clinical trial registries. The idea of trial registries is that researchers provide all the details of their study – such as the number of patients they need to recruit and the primary outcome (e.g. death or heart [...]
Before a clinical trial can commence a protocol – a plan of exactly how a trial will be conducted – will be formulated. As part of the planning, the individuals undertaking the trial will calculate approximately how many patients need to take part for the results to be meaningful (the ‘sample size’) and prespecify which [...]
It is important for journalists to highlight any potential bias in medical research so that patients and physicians alike can judge how valid clinical trial findings are. Today the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study showing that almost half of news stories on clinical trials fail to report the funding source of [...]
Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine has recently published an interesting review article on clinical trial design – ‘From randomized trials to registry studies: translating data into clinical information‘. This isn’t a guide on how to read a clinical paper – you should have a look at Prof Trisha Greenhalgh‘s book ‘How to read a paper‘ [...]