Hickam's Dictum: Let's Talk About These Many Damn Diseases

This post is about our article on Hickam's dictum, just published online (open access!) today.

I don't know if I read the 2004 NEJM CPC that mentioned Hickam's Dictum (HD - "A patient can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases") and popularized it, but knowing me, I probably did. My interest in HD piqued over the past 5-10 years because it has been increasingly invoked in complex cases, and whenever this happened, I always thought it was more likely that a unifying diagnosis (according with Ockham's razor) was present, and that the case had not yet been completely solved. So, we set out to investigate HD formally using three lines of evidence that you can read about in the article. We learned much more than we were able to report in the article because of word limitations, so I will report other interesting findings and insights gained along the way here (if you want to skip over the summary info to the "other interesting findings", scroll to the bold "other insights" subheading).

First, a summary of our results. As should be obvious, we confirmed that patients get multiple diagnoses, but case reports alleging to instantiate HD did not document random diagnoses occurring in a patient - there was a pattern to their occurrence. The vast majority of the time, there was a primary diagnosis which explained the patient's chief complaint and acute presentation, as well as one or more of the following: 

1. An incidentaloma (about 30% of cases)
2. A pre-existing, already known condition (about 25% of cases)
3. A component of a unifying diagnosis (about 40% of cases)
4. A symptomatic, coincident, independent disease, unrelated to the primary diagnosis, necessary to fully explain the acute presentation (about 4% of cases)

As we explain in the discussion, finding an incidentaloma during investigation of the chief complaint represents a spurious coincidence. Finding a new disease superimposed upon a chronic one and being surprised suggests that clinicians anchored to the chronic condition and forgot that new diseases can be superimposed on it; e.g., they failed to recognize that having recurrent CHF does not preclude development of CAP this admission. When authors report a primary disease and its complications, epiphenomena, or underlying cause, they appear to have failed to realize that those are all components of a unifying diagnosis! In the three (3!) cases we categorized as #4, we actually were being generous and honestly these probably represent one of the other categories but we didn't have sufficient information to confidently confirm that.

Pediatrics and Scare Tactics: From Rock-n-Play to Car Safety Seats

Is sleeping in a car seat dangerous?

Earlier this year, the Fisher-Price company relented to pressure from the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) and recalled 4.7 million of Rock 'n Play (RnP) baby rockers, which now presumably occupy landfills.  This recommendation stemmed from an "investigation" by consumer reports showing that since 2011, 32 babies died while sleeping in the RnP.  These deaths are tragic, but what does it mean?  In order to make sense of this "statistic" we need to determine a rate, based on the exposure period, something like "the rate of infant death in the RnP is 1 per 10 million RnP occupied hours" or something like that.  Then we would compare it to the rate of infant death sleeping in bed.  If it was higher, we would have a starting point for considering whether ceteris paribus, maybe it's the RnP that is causing the infant deaths.  We would want to know the ratio of observed deaths in the RnP to expected deaths sleeping in some other arrangement for the same amount of time.  Of course, even if we found the observed rate was higher than the expected rate, other possibilities exist, i.e., it's an association, a marker for some other factor, rather than a cause of the deaths.  A more sophisticated study would, through a variety of methods, try to control for those other factors, say, socioeconomic status, infant birth weight, and so on.  The striking thing to me and other evidence minded people was that this recall did not even use the observed versus expected rate, or any rate at all!  Just a numerator!  We could do some back of the envelope calculations with some assumptions about rate ratios, but I won't bother here.  Suffice it to say that we had an infant son at that time and we kept using the RnP until he outgrew it and then we gave it away.

Last week, the AAP was at it again, playing loose with the data but tight with recommendations based upon them.  This time, it's car seats.  In an article in the August, 2019 edition of the journal Pediatrics, Liaw et al present data showing that, in a cohort of 11,779 infant deaths, 3% occurred in "sitting devices", and in 63% of this 3%, the sitting device was a car safety seat (CSS).  In the deaths in CSSs, 51.6% occurred in the child's home rather than in a car.  What was the rate of infant death per hour in the CSS?  We don't know.  What is the expected rate of death for the same amount of time sleeping, you know, in the recommended arrangement?  We don't know!  We're at it again - we have a numerator without a denominator, so no rate and no rate to compare it to.  It could be that 3% of the infant deaths occurred in car seats because infants are sleeping in car seats 3% of the time!

Evolution Based Medicine: A Philosophical Framework for Understanding Why Things Don't Work

An afternoon session at the ATS meeting this year about "de-adoption" of therapies which have been shown to be ineffective was very thought provoking and the contrasts between it and the morning session on ARDS are nothing less than ironic.   As I described in the prior post about the baby in the bathwater, physicians seem to have a hard time de-adopting therapies.  Ask your colleagues at the next division conference if you should abandon hypothermia after cardiac arrest and rather just treat fever based on the TTM trial and the recent pediatric trial, and see what the response is.  Or, suggest that hyperglycemia (at any level in non-diabetic patients) in the ICU be observed rather than treated.  Or float the idea to your surgical colleagues that antibiotics be curtailed after four days in complicated intraabdominal infection, and see how quickly you are ushered out of the SICU.  Tell your dietition that you're going to begin intentionally underfeeding patients, or not feeding them at all and see what s/he say(s).  Propose that you discard sepsis resuscitation bundles, etc.  We have a hard time de-adopting.  We want to take what we have learned about physiology and pharmacology and apply it, to usurp control of and modify biological processes that we think we understand. We (especially in critical care) are interventionists at heart.

The irony occurred at ATS because in the morning session, we were told that there is incontrovertible (uncontroverted may have been a better word) evidence for the efficacy of prone positioning in ARDS (interestingly, one of the only putative therapies for ARDS that the ARDSnet investigators never trialed), and it was strongly suggested that we begin using esophageal manometry to titrate PEEP in ARDS.  So, in the morning, we are admonished to adopt, and in the afternoon we are chided to de-adopt a host of therapies.  Is this the inevitable cycle in critical care and medical therapeutics?  A headlong rush to adopt, then an uphill battle to de-adopt?

Tell Them to Go Pound Salt: Ideology and the Campaign to Legislate Dietary Sodium Intake

In the March 28th, 2013 issue of the NEJM, a review of sorts entitled "Salt in Health and Disease - A Delicate Balance" by Kotchen et al can be found.  My interest in this topic stems from my interest in the question of association versus causation, my personal predilection for salt, my observation that I lose a good deal of sodium in outdoor activities in the American Southwest, and my concern for bias in the generation of and especially the implementation of evidence in medicine as public policy.

This is an important topic, especially because sweeping policy changes regarding the sodium content of food are proposed, but it is a nettlesome topic to study, rife with hobgoblins.  First we need a well-defined research question:  does reduction in dietary sodium intake:  a.) reduce blood pressure in hypertensive people?  in all people?  b.) does this reduction in hypertension lead to improved outcomes (hypertension is in some ways a surrogate marker)?  In a utopian world, we would randomize thousands of participants to diets low in sodium and "normal" in sodium, we would measure sodium intake carefully, and we would follow the participants for changes in blood pressure and clinical outcomes for a protracted period.  But alas, this has not been done, and it will not likely be done because of cost and logistics, among other obstacles (including ideology).

Falling to Pieces: Hemolysis of the Hemoglobin Hypothesis

A paramount goal of this blog is to understand the evidence as it applies to the epistemology of medical knowledge, hypothesis testing, and overarching themes in the so-called evidence based medicine movement.  Swedberg et al report the results of a large[Amgen funded] randomized controlled trial of darbepoetin [to normalize hemoglobin values] in congestive heart failure (published online ahead of print this weekend) which affords us the opportunity to explore these themes afresh in the context of new and prior data.

The normalization heuristic, simply restated, is the tendency for all healthcare providers including nurses, respiratory therapists, nutritionists, physicians, and pharmacists among others, to believe intuitively or explicitly that values and variables that can be measured should be normalized if interventions to this avail are at their disposal.  As an extension, modifiable variables should be measured so that they can be normalized.  This general heuristic is deeply flawed, and indeed practically useless as a guide for clinical care.

The Cholesterol Hypothesis on the Beam: Dalcetrapib, PCSK9 inhibitors, and "off-target" effects of statins

The last month has witnessed the publication of three lines of research that could tip the balance of the evidence for the cholesterol hypothesis depending how things play out.  Followers of this blog know that I have a healthy degree of skepticism for the cholesterol hypothesis which was emboldened by studies of torcetrapib (blogged here and here) and anacetrapib that have come to light along with the failures of vytorin (ezetimibe; blogged here and here and here) and the addition of niacin to statins to improve cardiovascular outcomes in parallel with improvements in cholesterol numbers.

I think it's finally time to bury the CETP inhibitors. The November 29th NEJM (published online on November 5th) reports the results of the dal-OUTCOMES trial of dalcetrapib in patients with a recent acute coronary syndrome. Almost 16,000 patients were enrolled in this study of high risk patients, providing the study with ample power to detect meaningful improvements in cardiovascular outcomes - but alas, none were detected. The target is HDL, so the LDL hypothesis is not debunked by these data, but I think it is challenged nonetheless.