This is the best healthcare news I’ve heard in a while: Reversing Trend, Big Drop Is Seen in Breast Cancer (link is to the New York Times, but this news is everywhere). From the article:

Rates of the most common form of breast cancer dropped a startling 15 percent from August 2002 to December 2003, researchers reported yesterday.



The reason, they believe, may be because during that time, millions of women abandoned hormone treatment for the symptoms of menopause after a large national study concluded that the hormones slightly increased breast cancer risk.

For a great discussion of this issue, and some quibbling with the numbers used by the New York Times, visit Dr. Charles.

From Health Care Renewal: GSK Funds Talks About Screening Pregnant Women for Herpes. A snip:

The Wall Street Journal just published an article by David Armstrong about how continuing medical education (CME) often seems to serve the interests of its commercial sponsors. The focus of the article was on how GlaxoSmithKline funds speakers who seem to favor clinical policies that just might end up increasing the use of the GSK drug valacyclovir (Valtrex) for genital herpes infections.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: A new issue of JCEHP has just been published and indexed in MEDLINE. Link to this issue and to the latest issues of five other medical education journals here

 

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: Last week I wrote about the series of 16 articles published in Health Research Policy and Systems on improving the use of evidence in guideline development.  The last articles in the series have been published and you can read about them here.

 

Around this time of year I always look forward to the publication of the BMJ Christmas issue. The 2006 issue isn‘t out yet, but, for your viewing pleasure, here are some links to issues of Christmases past.

Nearly 8 million people are tuning into a surgical webcast site out of Hartford, Conn., according to this article. While doctors are using the site to get CME, more and more patients also are tuning in:

“Doctors have less and less time to get trained, less and less time to get their continuing medical education credits so the original idea was that we would create an online community where they could come and get trained,” said Peter Gailey, who co-founded the webcast company.



“The great surprise has been the value to consumers,” he said. “The growth on our web site has been very strong on the consumer side as more people go online to get information about their health care.”

This article from the Washington Post details the recent guilty plea from Pearson “Trey” Sunderland III, who was chief of the Geriatric Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. From the article:

Sunderland, 55, admitted to entering consulting agreements with the drugmaker beginning in 1998 without receiving the required approval in advance or disclosing his income after the fact. Sunderland was paid as a consultant on two projects in which his department was collaborating with Pfizer on research to identify chemical warning signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey: The reaction the recent BMJ study about physicians using Google as a diagnostic tool has been lively, to say the least. You can read about some of the reaction here.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

Here is an article from the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education [free full text]:

 

All Adult/Continuing/Health Education postings are here.

From Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

N Engl J Med. 2006 Nov 30;355(22):2330-7.

Patients’ views on financial conflicts of interest in cancer research trials. Hampson LA, Agrawal M, Joffe S, Gross CP, Verter J, Emanuel EJ. Department of Clinical Bioethics, Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.

BACKGROUND: Financial ties between researchers or medical centers and companies whose drugs are being tested have come under increasing scrutiny.

METHODS: We conducted in-person interviews with 253 patients in cancer-research trials (a 93% response rate) at five U.S. medical centers to determine their attitudes regarding potential financial conflicts of interest among researchers and medical centers.

RESULTS: More than 90% of patients expressed little or no worry about financial ties that researchers or institutions might have with drug companies. Most patients said they would have enrolled in the trial even if the drug company had paid the researcher for speaking (82% of those interviewed) or consulting (75%) or if the researcher had received royalty payments (70%) or owned stock in the company (76%). Similarly, most patients would have enrolled in the trial if their cancer center had owned stock in the drug company (77%) or received royalty payments from the company (79%). Most patients believed it was ethical for researchers to receive speaking fees (81%) or consulting fees (82%) from the company. However, a substantial minority of patients wanted disclosure of the oversight system for researchers (40%) and of researchers’ financial interests (31%); 17% thought no disclosure to patients was necessary. CONCLUSIONS: Most patients in cancer-research trials were not worried about financial ties between researchers or medical centers and drug companies and would still have enrolled in the trial if they had known about such financial ties. A substantial minority wanted to be informed about the oversight system to protect against financial conflicts of interest and about researchers’ financial interests. Copyright 2006 Massachusetts Medical Society.

This is bizarre. From The Australian News:

An analysis has found the typical Australian obstetrics conference, lasting several days, causes 4 per cent of the expected births to be shifted, in most cases bringing it forward by a few days.



In Australia the authors claim this means 116 babies are born on a different date than nature intended, while in the US 755 births annually are affected.




“Since it is unlikely that parents take these conferences into account when conceiving their child, this suggests that medical professionals are timing births to suit their conference schedule,” wrote the study’s authors from the Australian National University and Melbourne Business School.