Blog
Biology, medicine, and maybe some computer science.
Acute Kidney Injury
AKI is diagnosed by a creatinine rise of ≥ 0.3 mg/dL within 48 hours, a rise to ≥ 1.5 times baseline within 7 days, or oliguria. According to the KDIGO system, it is classified …
Adult Patients with Acute Dyspnea
One of the chief presenting complaints in the emergency department is dyspnea. The review article in question instructs clinicians on how to evaluate dyspnea and its etiology1. The …
Soliloquy of the Nameless
The rail separates the pine grove steeped in haze from the serene lake, which stretches to the base of a mountain barely visible beyond the winter haze, the apparition of a white …
Founders of EBM
When reading papers and textbooks, the following figures appear most repeatedly. Sackett Sackett was one of the founders of EBM. Contributions include several seminal RCTs showing …
Lessons from Basic Statistics for Clinician: Hypothesis Testing
Uncertainty comes with a study of modest power (too small a sample size to rule out chance)—one that does not produce a result below the 0.05 significance threshold but may still, …
Pharmaceutical Companies and Misleading Claims in the Literature
I remember reading somewhere—I forget where—that these companies will often publish their material in-house (i.e. rather than going to an independent, well-established journal, …
Grading Drugs Within a Class: Level 1-2 of Evidence
The paper1 categorizes levels of evidence for comparison of drugs within a class from 1-4, each with unique threats to validity. Levels 3 and 4 will be discussed later. Superiority …
Assuming the Drug Class Effect
It is understood, broadly speaking, that drugs of the same class confer the same merits/risks, though one may be more efficacious and safer than the other. The drug class paper …
Surrogate endpoints in clinical trials
Surrogate endpoints are endpoints that are not directly related to the clinical outcome of interest but are used as a substitute for it. They are often used in clinical trials to …
JAMA on how to read clinical trials
There’s a series from JAMA that goes over how to read clinical trials. The series is written by individuals who are widely recognized in the field of evidence-based medicine. …