A quick update before I proceed with the current post: The Institute of Medicine has met and they agree with me that sodium restriction is for the birds. (Click here for a New York Times summary article.) In other news, the oh-so-natural Omega-3 fatty acid panacea did not improve cardiovascular outcomes as reported in the NEJM on May 9th, 2013.
An article by the TOPPS investigators in the May 9th NEJM is very useful to remind us not to believe everything we read, to always check our premises, and that some data are so dependent on the perspective from which they're interpreted or the method or stipulations of analysis that they can be used to support just about any viewpoint.
An article by the TOPPS investigators in the May 9th NEJM is very useful to remind us not to believe everything we read, to always check our premises, and that some data are so dependent on the perspective from which they're interpreted or the method or stipulations of analysis that they can be used to support just about any viewpoint.
The authors sought to determine if a strategy of withholding
prophylactic platelet transfusions for platelet counts below 10,000 in patients
with hematologic malignancy was non-inferior to giving prophylactic platelet
transfusions. I like this idea, because
I like "less is more" and I think the body is basically
antifragile. But non-inferior how? And what do we mean by non-inferior in this
trial?