Monthly Archives: February 2011

Improving physicians’ understanding of statistical tests

To correctly interpret claims made in the medical literature, the reader must understand the statistical significance testing that underpins them. There are concerns, however, that many physicians misunderstand the probabilistic logic underlying these tests. As well as having a potentially negative effect on the quality of medical research, this lack of understanding could ultimately have… Read more »

Medicine

Exploiting the advances of multimedia technology in medical publishing

Articles in medical and scientific journals have long been beset by restrictions on the type of figures that can be incorporated into the main manuscript file. For example, three-dimensional (3D) images are likely to be relegated to supplementary files, hindering the reader’s understanding and analysis of critical information. However, advances in multimedia technology mean that… Read more »

Medicine

Early-onset AD – a call for clinical trial inclusion

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a significant public health burden and has huge devastating effects at an individual level. For over two decades, an arbitrary cut-off of age of 65 years has been used to distinguish between the two phenotypes of early and late-onset AD and since the majority of Alzheimer’s disease patients develop late-onset AD,… Read more »

Medicine

Two years of Genome Medicine

Since its launch in January 2009, Genome Medicine has acted as a forum for reporting and discussing  some of the most exciting research in the evolving field of genomic medicine. To mark its second anniversary, the section editors of Genome Medicine collaborated to produce an Editorial in which they review some of the breakthroughs made… Read more »

Medicine