A study reported in this week’s issue of JAMA attempts to correlate preoperative hematocrit levels with postoperative outcomes in elderly veterans undergoing noncardiac surgery. Both 30-day postoperative mortality and cardiac event rates increased in patients with hematocrits either …
It has been a little while, but stem cells are back in the news. Congress has passed legislation to provide more money for stem cell research, but did not reach a veto-proof majority. Meanwhile, scientists at MIT have successfully transformed …
Much of the week in the media was spent discussing XDR TB. Andrew Speaker, a man on his way to his wedding in Santorini Greece (the picture of his wedding is to the right) managed to evade US security multiple times. The …
The big bomb this past week was the Rosiglitazone Effect. Resulting in front page news in various newspapers (on multiple days), the meta-analysis in last week’s NEJM is causing quite the stir. For more information, see the …
This week’s review is a potpourri of interesting if not groundbreaking articles.
The pharmaceutical industry certainly got off easier this week (see last week’s shortcuts) and the New York Times focused instead on the “industrialization” of the art of medicine. A hospital group …
Welcome to our first theme issue of ShortCuts. This week, we decided to focus on the tribulations of the pharmaceutical industry, which recently seems to be plagued by new FDA advisories and NY Times exposés.
The first bad news for pharmaceutical companies occurred …
9p21. More than just three numbers and one letter, this stretch of DNA, which is present in 1 out of five Caucasians, results in a 64% increase in the risk of myocardial infarction. Two groups, performing genome-wide association studies, made this discovery, which …
In the present era of almost daily “landmark trial” publications, the literature this past week took a slightly more introspective turn. Two separate journals turned the spotlight back on the uneasy relationship between commerce and science – and well written and thoughtful editorials …