Research and evaluation

Knowing how to read research papers makes us better pharmacists, so I started a journal club

When she noticed that colleagues were uncomfortable with research papers, meaning they were locked out of clinical conversations, community pharmacist Iqra Sarwar took action.…

RECOVERY trial halts recruitment to colchicine arm because of a lack of ‘convincing’ evidence

The anti-inflammatory drug colchicine has shown no significant difference in improving survival rates from usual care in patients with COVID-19.…

New drug cuts the risk of death in bladder cancer by 30% compared with chemotherapy, study suggests

A trial comparing new antibody-drug conjugate enfortumab vedotin with chemotherapy in patients with bladder cancer has found that overall survival was longer in the group receiving the new drug.…

Half of asthma patients in the UK overusing SABAs, study finds

In a UK asthma programme, 284,683 out of 574,913 patients were found to be “potentially overusing” short-acting β2-agonists.…

Gout drug could cut length of hospitalisation in patients with moderate to severe COVID-19

Using the gout drug colchicine as a treatment for COVID-19 could reduce the length of both supplemental oxygen therapy and hospitalisation in patients, a small trial finds.…

Government to fund COVID-19 clinical trial using different vaccines for first and second doses

The COVID-19 Heterologous Prime Boost study will seek to establish the effects of using different vaccines for the first and second dose.…

Critically ill COVID-19 patients unlikely to benefit from convalescent plasma, early results from UK trial show

Results from the REMAP-CAP trial have suggested there is a very low probability that convalescent plasma reduces the number of days in intensive care or death in patients who are severely ill with COVID-19.…

Taking the P: why the founder of P-values would be turning in his grave

How P-values are used today has gradually morphed further and further from their intended use and scientists are now questioning the prominence they are given when interpreting clinical trial data.…

Gillian Leng: ‘COVID-19 has been a strain, but also an opportunity’

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s new chief executive, Gillian Leng, took the helm in April 2020. She speaks to us about what lessons the organisation has taken away from the past year.…

The pandemic’s challenge to evidence-based medicine shows off-label use is an important tool

In 2020, the medical and research communities have scrambled towards finding an effective intervention against the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. And in lieu of data from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of interventions against the disease (considered the gold standard of evidence), clinicians wer…