Eczema Link to Asthma is Weak

Only a minority of children with atopic eczema go on to develop asthma in later childhood, Dutch researchers have found.

Looking at 13 prospective cohort studies, they reported the pooled odds ratio for the risk of asthma after eczema was 2.14.

van der Hulst and colleagues reported that: 'Although there is an increased risk of developing asthma after eczema in early childhood, only one in every three children with eczema develops asthma during later childhood. This is lower than previously assumed.'

J Allergy Clin Immunol 2007; 120: 565-9

Evidence Based Medicine Modules from BMJ Learning

If you want to improve your understanding of statistics or diagnostics tests BMJ Learning provides helpful modules:
Understanding statistics
Understanding statistics 2: is there a significant difference?
Understanding statistics: tips for hospital doctors (Interactive case history)
What's a good diagnostic test?
How to organise a research project from scratch? (Read, reflect, respond)
These modules are free but you have to register. BMJ Learning also provides a range of other up to date, high quality, clinical and non-clinical learning modules.

Poll Results and EBM

Judging from the albeit small number of votes on this week’s poll, it seems that the least useful aspect of what you find here are journal articles. This is not surprising: you are still learning the basics, so why should you bother with journals? Those of you who came to the Fresher’s week introductions might recall my statement: “Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life”. It has taken most of you 2-6 years to get here, doing A levels and in some cases a first degree.

William Osler said “To cover the vast field of medicine in 4 years is an impossible task”. Think about the size of medical knowledge: There are 11,000 diseases and 3,200 drugs listed in Diagnostic Pro. If I wanted to brush up my knowledge it would take me 30 years, if I learned about one disease each day. Over 500,000 new articles enter Medline each year (1,500 per day), and 30,000 randomised controlled trials are published each year (95 per day). So how do we cope with this information overlaod? The answer was given clearly by Prof Cacciattolo at this year’s TRD: learn to read the literature, learn to sift the wheat from the chaff. But, I hear you ask, how should we learn this? Will this be taught in our medical course? Is there a course we can take, maybe something online? I have no idea (but you could start looking). I helped to run a course on Evidence Based Medicine together with a couple of family doctors a couple of months ago. If you are interested, post a comment here and we will see what can be done. In the meantime, keep a log book of answerable questions and read an evidence based journal.