Medicine and Science from The BMJ

Vinay Prasad - there is overdiagnosis in clinical trials

We want clinical trials to be thorough - but Vinay Prasad, assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health Science University, argues that the problem of overdiagnosis may be as prevalent, in the way we measure disease in our research, as our practice.
In this podcast he joins us to discuss the problem, and why he thinks what qualifies as disease in clinical trials may be getting so broad that outcomes are becoming less meaningful and harder to interpret.
Read the full analysis:
https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3783

UK children are drinking less and the importance of a publicly provided NHS

Brits have a reputation as Europe’s boozers - and for good reason, with alcohol consumption higher than much of the rest of the continent. That reputation is extended to our young people too - but is it still deserved? Joanna Inchley, senior research fellow at the University of St Andrews, explains new research on decreasing drinking - http://www.hbsc.org/
Also this week, as part of our coverage of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NHS, we’ve been running a series of articles exploring this unique institution’s future. Neena Modi, professor of neonatal health, and Jonathan Clarke, clinical research fellow, from Imperial College London, passionately believe that the NHS needs to be publicly financed - and importantly, publicly provided.
https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3580

Don’t save on transport at the cost of the NHS

Last week we heard about how evidence in policy making is imperilled - but today we’re hearing about a plan to make evidence about health central to all aspects of government.
Laura Webber, director of public health modelling at the UK Health Forum, Susie Morrow, chair of the Wandsworth Living Streets Group and Brian Ferguson, chief economist at Public Health England join us to discuss a “health in all policies” approach, with protected funding for preventive interventions.
Read their full analysis:
https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3377

15 Iona Heath

This week a very different kind of conversation on the Recommended Dose – one that considers the art of medicine more than the science. Iona Heath is a long-time family doctor who has worked in a London GP clinic for over 30 years, and at one time became President of the Royal College of General Practitioners. With an international profile, gained in part through her much-loved writing in the BMJ, Iona is unlike many of our previous guests. For a start, she loves words more than numbers, and literature more than clinical guidelines. Host Ray Moynihan caught up with Iona at a recent conference in Helsinki – where she'd just presented little data but much food for thought from the likes of novelists EM Forster and James Baldwin. Here, she shares more of her love of literature and thoughtful commitment to the best kind of patient care.

Defending evidence informed policy making from ideological attack

If you’re of a scientific persuasion, watching policy debates around Brexit, or climate change, or drug prohibition are likely to cause feelings of intense frustration about the dearth of evidence in those discussions.
In this podcast we're joined by Chris Bonell, professor of public health sociology - in this podcast he airs those frustrations, and worries that the rise of populism is pushing evidence even further out of policy decision.
Read the accompanying essay:
https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3827

How often do hospital doctors change long term medication during an inpatient stay?

More than ½ of patients leave hospital with changes to four or more of their long-term medications - but how appropriate are those changes?
New research published on bmj.com looks at antihypertensive medication prescription changes to try and model that - and found that more than half of intensifications occurred in patients with previously well controlled outpatient blood pressure.
To discuss what they found, we're joined by Timothy Anderson, primary care research fellow, and Michael Steinman, professor of medicine, both from UCSF.
Read the open access research:
https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3503

Nutritional science - Is quality more important than quantity?

We at The BMJ care about food, and if our listener stats are to be believed, so do you.
In this podcast we’re looking at quality as an important driver of a good diet. At our recent food conference - Food For Thought - hosted in Zurich by Swiss Re we brought researchers in many fields of nutritional science together. We asked people with competing ideas to write articles to elucidate where there’s agreement, and where there is still contention.
There was lots of disagreement - but one thing that was widely agreed on was that, quality of food matters. Quality is as, if not more, important than quantity.
In this podcast we’ll be exploring what quality is, how industrial food production affects it, and how we conceptualise quality. Joining us are Martin White, Mathilde Touvier, Jean Adams, Nicola Guess and Alan Levinovitz.
For the last podcast in the food series:
https://soundcloud.com/bmjpodcasts/nutritional-science-why-studying-what-we-eat-is-so-difficult?
For more on the Food for Thought series
https://www.bmj.com/food-for-thought

Preventing Overdiagnosis 2018 - part 2: What opened your eyes to overdiagnosis?

The concept of overdiagnosis is pretty hard to get - especially if you’ve been educated in a paradigm where medicine has the answers, and it’s only every a positive intervention in someone’s life - the journey to understanding the flip side - that sometimes medicine can harm often takes what Stacey Carter director of Research for Social Change at Wollongong university described in an preventing overdiagnosis podcast last year as a “moral shock” - https://soundcloud.com/bmjpodcasts/preventing-overdiagnosis-2017-stacy-carter-on-the-culture-of-overmedicalisation
This year, we asked some of the leaders in the field to describe what it was that opened their eyes to overdiagnosis and overtreatment - and recorded the session for you.
You’ll hear from Fiona Godlee, editor in Chief of The BMJ, Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, directors of the Center for Medicine and Media at The Dartmouth Institute, John Brodersen - professor of general practice at the University of Copenhagen, and Barry Kramer - director of the Division of Cancer Prevention at the U.S. National cancer institute.
The

Preventing overdiagnosis 2018 - Part 1

This week saw the latest Preventing Overdiagnosis conference - this time in Copenhagen.
The conference is a is a forum where researchers and practitioners can present examples of overdiagnosis - and we heard about the various ways which disease definitions are being subtly widened, and diagnostic thresholds lowered.
In this podcast we talk to Allen Frances, psychiatrist and former chair of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We also hear from friends of the podcast, Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz about the way in which some disease awareness campaigns fuel inappropriate diagnosis.
https://www.preventingoverdiagnosis.net/
https://www.bmj.com/too-much-medicine

Have we misunderstood TB’s timeline?

The number of people estimated to be latently infected with TB - that is infected with TB, which has not yet manifested symptoms - is around 2 billion. That is 1 in 3 people on the planet are infected by the bacteria. The World Health Organization’s website notes that on average 5-10% of those infected with TB will develop active TB.
That number is terrifying, but a new analysis published in the BMJ, suggests that the assumption that latent TB often has a very long incubation period of many years may be wrong - and that may change how we calculate the number of people affected, and our whole approach to tackling the disease.
This podcast features Lalita Ramakrishnan, professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Cambridge University, Paul Edelstein, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Marcel Behr, professor of medicine at McGill university.
Together they discuss the analysis article "Revisiting the timetable of tuberculosis" - https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k2738