Do you change your practice when new evidence is published? Will these articles change your practice? Will you read them? Does anyone read them? I don’t know, but here is another month of my reading summarized. For the regular readers, you will have noticed I have taken a few weeks […]
TXA
23 posts
Despite being widely talked about in glowing terms, the original WOMAN trial was clearly negative, with no benefit in their primary outcome, and no change in all cause mortality, and therefore no hint of benefit. (There is a lot of confusion about what disease specific mortality means when this paper […]
As usual, a random smattering of articles. This group was presented as part of a live podcast recording at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Australia, where I was honoured to be invited to be the WG Smith visiting lecturer. The guests helped select the papers, which means they are […]
Transfusion seems like the simplest intervention in medicine. The patient is losing blood, so let’s put some back in. Not much more complicated than an oil change. Sure, you need to use a specific brand, but as long as the system is topped up, everything should run just fine. Therefore, […]
The pace of these literature summaries has decreased over the years, but perhaps that means that quality has increased? I think there is an interesting variety of papers this time around, from sepsis, to bullshit, to patient access to their own results online. A few huge papers dropped in the […]
A key scientific lesson that I have discussed numerous times on this blog is that the interpretation of any new study must be placed within the context of what is already known about the topic. Although there must be equipoise for medical research to be ethical, equipoise does not mean […]
Last week we covered TXA for epistaxis. The NoPAC study kept with the recent tradition in TXA papers and showed no benefit. This week, we are going to look at another TXA RCT, but this time for the management of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). In case you were worried, this paper […]
For the last two decades, TXA has been put on a pedestal in emergency medicine. It has been sold as the perfect drug: life saving with absolutely no side effects. The silver bullet. Unfortunately, the evidence for this ‘wonder drug’ has never been that great. I have a very large […]
October 2020. A month that many have declared the worst of all time, but can it really be that bad if you are getting another edition of the research roundup, with all sorts of EBM goodness?