Medicine and Science from The BMJ

Talk Evidence - Z drugs, subclinical hypothyroidism and Drazen’s dozen

This week on the podcast, (2.02) a listener asks, when we suggest something to stop, should we suggest an alternative instead?
(8.24) Helen tells us to stop putting people on treatment for subclinical hypothyroidism, but what does that mean for people who are already receiving thyroxine?
(20.55) Carl has a black box warning about z drugs, and wonders what the alternative for sleep are.
(30.11) Finally the NEJM has published Jeff Drazen's dozen most influential papers - but not a systematic review amongst them. Cue the rant.
Reading list:
Rapid rec on subclinical hypothyroidism
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2006
Temporal trends in use of tests in UK primary care, 2000-15
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4666
Black box warning for z-drugs
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2165
Drazen's dozen
https://cdn.nejm.org/pdf/Drazens-Dozen.pdf

Did international accord on tobacco reduce smoking?

WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros recently said “Since it came into force 13 years ago, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control remains one of the world’s most powerful tools for promoting public health,”.
But is it?
That’s what a to studies just published on bmj.com try and investigate - one of which pulls together all the data we have on smoking rates, from 1970 to 2015, and then a quasi-experimental study which tries to model what the effect of the FCTC has had.
Steven Hoffman, and Matthieu Poirier from the Global Strategy Lab at York University join us to explain what their research means, and why it’s time to double down on our attempts to reduce smoking.
Read the open access research:
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2287
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2231

Working as a team, and combating stress, in space

Nicole Stott is an engineer, aquanaut and one of the 220 astronauts to have lived and worked on the International Space Station.
In a confined space, under huge pressure, with no way out, it's important that teams maintain healthy dynamics, and individuals can manage their stress adequately, and in this podcast Nicole explains a little about living on the ISS and how she coped for 91 days.
Read more about the Space Art Foundation:
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l4244
More from Risky Business
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Thoroughly and deliberately targeted; Doctors in Syria

As Syria enters its ninth year of conflict, doctors are struggling to provide health care to a badly damaged country.
While dealing with medicine shortages, mass casualties and everything that comes with working in a warzone, healthcare facilities and their staff are also facing an unprecedented number of targeted and often repeated attacks.
According to a new report, there were 257 recorded attacks on hospitals, medical transportation and healthcare workers in Syria in 2018. And despite these attacks being illegal under international law, they are becoming the new normal.
In this podcast, Elisabeth Mahase talks to Feras Fares, a gynaecologist from Syria, Len Rubenstein, chair of the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, and Declan Barry, an Irish pediatrician who worked with MSF in Syria in 2013.

Planning for the unplannable

Hi impact, low probability events are a planners nightmare. You know that you need to think about them, but how can you prioritise which event - terrorist attack, natural disaster, disease outbreak, deserves attention - and how can you sell the risks of that, but not oversell them?
Risky business is a conference where some of these kind of things can be discussed - how do we think about risk, how do we plan for it - at this year’s conference we heard from one of the men who rescued the boys from a cave in Thailand, the fireman in charge of Grenfell, and the medical teams responding to the three latest terrorist attacks in the UK.
In this podcast we talk to Amy Pope, former advisor to the Whitehouse during president Obama’s tenure. There she was charged with thinking about these high impact, low probability events.
More from Risky Business
https://www.riskybusiness.events/

What Matters To You Day

It's What Matters To You day - #wmty - and in this podcast Anya de Iongh, The BMJ's patient editor, and Joe Fraser, author of Joe's Diabetes who works at NHS England on personalised care, get together to discuss what personalised care actually means, how it changes the ways in which patients and health professionals interact, and how it can be practically done.
We also hear from three people who are making personalised care actually happen
Jo McGoldrick is a health coach who works at Lions Health GP Practice in Dudley.
Joanne Appleton is a Commissioning Manager for Personalised Care at Gloucester CCG
Jono Broad lives with long term health conditions and is involved in regional and QI work around personalised care.

Tech and the NHS - A tale of two cultures

The NHS is about caring for people, free at the point of care, creating a safety net which catches the most vulnerable. Tech has been defined by the facebook maxim "move fast, break things" - looking to disrupt a sector, get investment and move on. 
We want to be able to harness the potential utility of digital tech in the NHS - but how can those two cultures be reconciled, and what salutary lessons should we learn from other industries (pharmaceuticals, devices) before we embark on these new ventures.
In this podcast we hear from;
Neil Sebire, Chief Research Information Officer and Director, Great Ormond Street Hospital Digital Research, Informatics and Virtual Environments (DRIVE) Unit
Dr Ramani Moonesinghe, Professor and Head of Centre for Perioperative Medicine, University College London
Indra Joshi, Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence Clinical Lead at the newly formed NHS X

Finding out who funds patient groups

We’ve been banging the drum about transparency of payment to doctors for years - we’ve even put a moratorium on financial conflicts of interest in the authors of any of our education articles. Not because we think that all doctors who receive money from industry are being influenced to push their agenda - but because we have no way of telling when that’s happening…
At the same time, and rightly, patient groups are becoming more involved in setting things like research priorities, and in guideline development - and we’re campaigning to increase that involvement. but as that involvement increases, it’s also important to make sure that potential industry influence is made transparent.
Piotr Ozieranski, is an assistant professor at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath and one of the authors of a new analysis which attempts to build a picture of industry funding of UK patient groups.
Read the full analysis:
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1806

Talk Evidence - cancer causing food, prostate cancer and disease definitions

Helen Macdonald and Carl Heneghan are back again talking about what's happened in the world of evidence this month.
(1.05) Carl rants about bacon causing cancer
(7.10) Helen talks about prostate cancer, and we hear from the author of the research paper which won Research Paper Of The Year at the BMJ awards.
We also cover disease definition and a call to have GPs more involved in that process, (24.12)and a new call for papers into conflicts of interest (29.40)
Reading list:
MRI-Targeted or Standard Biopsy for Prostate-Cancer Diagnosis.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29552975?dopt=Abstract
Reforming disease definitions: a new primary care led, people-centred approach
https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2019/04/11/bmjebm-2018-111148
Commercial interests, transparency, and independence: a call for submissions
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1706

What caused the drop in stroke mortality in the UK

Stroke mortality rates have been declining in almost every country, and that reduction could result from a decline in disease occurrence or a decline in case fatality, or both. Broadly - is that decline down to better treatment or better prevention.
Olena Seminog, a researcher, and and Mike Rayner, professor of population health, both from the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, join us to discuss their study which has used a large database to try and determine what has most affected stroke mortality.
Read the full open access research paper:
https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1778