Category archive: Clinical research

Lucentis, Avastin, and the role of licensing

Two drugs for treating age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a disease that can lead to important loss of vision, have recently been much in the news. The drugs are Lucentis (generic name ranibizumab), which is expensive and is licensed for the treatment of AMD, and Avastin (generic name bevacizumab), which is much cheaper, but not licensed for the treatment of AMD. Both drugs are inhibitors of vascular endothelial growth factor A. In other words, they have the same mechanism of action. … Continue reading

The Burzynski Clinic

I have seen a number of very sad stories over the last few months that all have something in common. The most recent was printed in the Observer last Sunday. It is an utterly heart-rending story of a little girl who is dying of brain cancer. It is hard to imagine anything more terrible for any parents to have to face. It is understandable that when you find yourself in that situation, you will be prepared to clutch at straws. … Continue reading

Malaria vaccine

One of the most exciting papers I have seen for a long time was published in the New England Journal of Medicine yesterday. This describes a randomised controlled trial of a malaria vaccine in African children. This is important. Malaria is a terrible disease, which kills almost a million people a year, most of them children, and almost all of them in developing countries. And over 200 million a year suffer non-fatal, but still thoroughly miserable malaria infection. Although various … Continue reading

Exciting development in antiviral research

I recently heard, via the BBC’s excellent Science in Action programme, about an exciting new development in the fight against viral diseases. The research, published in PLoS One, describes a radical new approach to antiviral treatment.  It relies on the fact that most viruses produce long sequences of double-stranded RNA, which is rare in mammalian cells: our cells generally only produce short sequences of double-stranded RNA. In an ingenious technique, the researchers have found a way of killing cells with … Continue reading

Zinc and the common cold

Today’s big health news story is a new Cochrane review that looked at zinc as a treatment for the common cold. The conclusion of the review is that taking zinc supplements within 24 hours of the onset of a cold can reduce the duration and severity of symptoms. However, I’m not convinced. The finding is based on a relatively small number of studies. Only 6 studies were used in the meta-analysis of the duration of symptoms. 4 of those studies were … Continue reading

New podcast from the Institute of Clinical Research

The Institute of Clinical Research (ICR) have today launched a new monthly podcast, which looks at news from the world of clinical research, and I’m delighted to say that I was a co-presenter of the first episode, along with Andrew Smith from the ICR. The podcast is not intended as a comprehensive news roundup (the ICR website does that job nicely), but a chance to have a more in-depth look and a bit of a chat about a few of … Continue reading

Should we all take a daily dose of aspirin?

The lead item on the news on Radio 4 when I woke up this morning was a paper that has just been published in the Lancet on the effects of daily aspirin use on cancer deaths. This was presented as a major new piece of research that might mean we should all be taking aspirin every day. Does it? Well, it was certainly an excellent piece of research, which tells as a great deal about the effect of daily aspirin … Continue reading

Worrying scientific illiteracy among our elected representatives

Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I have just found out (via @bengoldacre and @DrEvanHarris) that one of our esteemed elected representatives, David Tredinnick MP, has tabled 3 Early Day Motions singing the praises of homoeopathy. Oh dear. These EDMs are based on 3 published papers in the peer reviewed literature, which claim to show homoeopathy is effective. As anyone who has taken the workshop that I run for EMWA on critical reading of medical literature will know, just because … Continue reading

Open access publishing

Yesterday’s big health story was the news that 5 portions of fruit and veg per day probably doesn’t have much of an impact on cutting your cancer risk after all. As regular readers of this blog will know, I don’t much like taking such stories at face value, and always prefer to read the original research. Quite often, that shows that the headlines in the popular media are at best incomplete and at worst downright misleading, as we saw only … Continue reading

Breast cancer screening and peer review

I’ve been thinking some more about the paper on breast cancer screening that I blogged about last week. Just to recap, a paper was published last week claiming that the benefits of breast cancer screening comfortably outweigh the harms. This paper was picked up by the media, who reported its conclusions almost entirely without any critical evaluation, simply taking the authors conclusions as established fact. However, as I previously pointed out, the conclusions are based on some extremely precarious calculations … Continue reading