Trip Database Blog

I was intrigued when I saw the headline on the BBC News ‘Child cold drugs under scrutiny‘. The article reports:

“A review by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) found “no robust evidence” that many popular remedies work in children.”

I was intrigued as I thought – this is old news! I did a quick search on TRIP and found the 2008 Cochrane Systematic Review ‘Over-the-counter medications for acute cough in children and adults in ambulatory settings‘. This concluded:

“There is no good evidence for or against the effectiveness of OTC medicines in acute cough. The results of this review have to be interpreted with caution due to differences in study characteristics and quality. Studies often showed conflicting results with uncertainty regarding clinical relevance. Higher quality evidence is needed to determine the effectiveness of self-care treatments for acute cough.”

I was also convinced we’d answered a question on it, so search TRIP Answers and found this Q&A from 2006 ‘Is there any role of cough mixture in treatment of cough?‘ which found an earlier version of the above Cochrane Systematic Review – from 2004.

So, since at least 2004, it has been explicitly stated that there is no evidence for OTC cough medicines.

The biggest question for me is not ‘Why the interest by the MHRA now?’ but the more important ‘Why no interest until now?’

A very interesting video

http://twistage.fastcompany.tv/plugins/player.swf?v=7fe85f6e3c4f5&p=scobleizer-tv_fctv_social

I posted about this soon after he gave the talk. Now, via twitter, I’ve been alerted to the audio and slides for Professor Sir Michael Rawlins excellent talk on the nature of clinical evidence.

Strongly recommended – click here to view.

The relatively well-hyped Medpedia has been released as a beta. I saw the announcement via this TechCrunch article.

Too early to make comment, it’ll take a few weeks to fully appreciate the site.

A great new drug has been approved by the FDA.

http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/videoplayer2/flvplayer.swf

• This is my first time 17.9%
• Infrequently 7.1%
• On a monthly basis 14.3%
• On a weekly basis 25%
• On a daily basis 35.7%

How often do you find the information you’re after?

You’ll note in this graph (click to make larger) that we’ve got comparative data from 2007. It appears we’ve improved. In 2007 66% of users found the information most or all of the time, this has now risen to 80.7%. This is a vital measure for any search engine, so it’s great to know we’re supplying better results than ever.

Improvements

We listed 6 possible upgrades to TRIP, the top 3 were:

• Alert me when new research of interest to me is added to TRIP
• Add extra content to better answer my questions
• Include recent news items

Web 2.0 tools

Around 60% of people taking the survey skipped this question – but the rest reported using the following.

• Blogs 73.9%
• Facebook 52.2%
• Twitter 21.7%
• Other 17.4%

• I think TRIP is a fantastic resource
• Excellent service — thanks for providing it at no charge! Don’t change the focus on the use of evidence-based answers, please
• I’ve been using TRIP for years and find it a wonderful resource
• Nothing to suggest thanks, it’s an excellent and unparallelled resource
• congratulations and thanks you for spanish version
• great resource!

A fascinating post from Google on how we track data on search results:

See the full post for further information.

I’m very excited by this piece of news ‘New format for BMJ research articles in print‘ which is announcing two abridged versions of BMJ articles:

• PICO model. A ‘classic’ EBM method of structuring a clinical question (see this article on the CEBM site for further details) where P = patient, I = intervention, C = comparison and O = outcome.
• Short cuts. Articles written by the BMJ itself.

I think both methods have merit, PICO as it structures the paper into a clinical question and answer and Short cuts as the BMJ take an independent view of the paper. The rapid responses are worth a read.

For those of you not familiar with the name, Adam Bosworth used to be Vice President of Product Management at Google heading up Google health. A couple of talks of his can be seen via this page. To link directly to the presentations, see below:

• Helping President Obama: How to Spend $50 Billion on Health IT – pdf or pptx.
• A Modest Proposal: New Products and Services to Fix Health Care – video or slides.