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Memantine and/or donezepil for moderate Alzheimers
Is this cheating? You would imagine that when the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) funds a multi-million pound trial of a drug to treat Alzheimers disease, and publishes the results in the New England...
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Salami publication
A florid example from BJOG Salami publication is a pernicious type of scientific misconduct where authors publish slightly different aspects of one research study in different papers. For example,...
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Closed Stapels
A lesson for all The final report of the Diederick Stapels investigation - English version here - makes sobering reading. Not just the 55 fraudulent publications, the unsound theses, or the sloppy work...
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Predatory
The new Vanity Publishing The scientific literature has long been burdened with papers which advance the author’s career more than they advance science. I’ve long believed (click here) that Open...
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Objective sociology?
Nice test coming up A recent retraction in Society & Natural Resources should test the researchers’ objectivity. Story here. The original paper claimed that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency...
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Boston/Botswana circumcision trial – 2
Is death a “minimal risk”? Yesterday’s post (click here) concerned a randomised trial from Botswana (accessible here), which was so poorly designed and executed by the researchers from Boston, that it...
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KEEPS Confusing
The Kronos Early Estrogen Prevention Study (KEEPS click here) Why would a randomised double-blind trial, which completed recruitment in June 2008 and whose participants presumably reached the final...
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More KEEPS confusion
I was off target this morning (click here), wondering why an open sub-study paper had appeared before the main KEEPS trial results. But not in a good way. The KEEPS main trial has still not appeared in...
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Royal Rubbish
Drive an old car – your baby deserves it The Royal Colleges are struggling for a role in the modern world, but last week’s, widely ridiculed, advice from the Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, about...
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It’s no joke
A colleague recently forwarded this photo to me, expecting to make me laugh – and a few years ago I would have. Imagine being foolish enough to offer your penis up for circumcision by the fellow who...
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Soft science
Elke Geraerts Psychologist Elke Geraerts is a star. A TV and radio regular, she writes her own column, and has been called the ‘smartest woman in the Netherlands.’ She runs the Clinical Cognition Lab...
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Singing and snoring
BBC conned by predatory publisher Yesterday the BBC Radio 4 Today programme had a long item (click here) about a randomised trial of singing exercises to treat sleep apnoea and snoring. Quote; “A...
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KEEPS disappear’n
Where have the KEEPS trial results gone? The Kronos Early Estrogen Prevention Study (KEEPS) was an important investigator-led randomised trial funded by a charity, the Kronos Institute. The KEEPS...
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Thinly sliced Danish
More BJOG salami Last year we drew readers attention to a florid example of salami publication in BJOG (click here). A group of authors from Denmark had taken five papers over 56 pages, to report a...
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Cheap caseload midwifery
Or Mumbo Jumbo Economics? The authors of last week’s randomised trial of caseload midwifery in the Lancet (click here, or for those without access here caseload midwifery) claim to have shown that this...
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Scraping the SCOPE barrel
Predicting pre-eclampsia Between 2004 and 2008, the Screening for Pregnancy Endpoints (SCOPE) Consortium collected blood samples from 3529 nulliparous pregnant women at 14-16, and at 19-21 weeks...
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Boston/Botswana circ. trial update
How did three babies die? Earlier this year a randomised trial by US researchers comparing different ways to circumcise newborn African boys appeared to alter both its sample size and the number of...
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Lost to follow-up
2/3 participants in a research trial on postnatal depression This randomised trial of internet-based behavioural activation (i-BA), to treat postnatal depression had some unusual design features....
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Another Exeter/Netmums depression trial
Better follow-up, but unregistered again, and too many endpoints Yesterday (click here) I commented on a postnatal depression trial run with the parenting website Netmums, in which only 1/3 of...
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The REFRAMED trial
Can true believers get at the truth? The UK Medical Research Council (MRC) is currently spending over £2M on a randomised trial evaluating a newish type of talking therapy, Radically Open Dialectical...
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