Childhood diabetes associated with increasing birth weight - 7% increase in risk for every 1000 g in weight

Childhood onset diabetes is associated with increasing birth weight, equivalent to a 7% increase in risk for every 1000 g in weight.

Caesarean section increases the risk by around 20%.

The risk of childhood onset diabetes increases with maternal age: 5% for each five years of age.

References:
Maternal age and diabetes in childhood. BMJ 2010;340:c623.

Image source: Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License.

Increasing Diet Polyunsaturated Fat in Place of Saturated Fat Reduces Risk of Coronary Heart Disease

Reduced saturated fat (SFA) consumption is recommended to decrease coronary heart disease (CHD), but there is an absence of strong supporting evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of clinical CHD events and few guidelines focus on any specific replacement nutrient. Additionally, some public health groups recommend lowering or limiting polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) consumption, a major potential replacement for SFA.

The overall pooled risk reduction was 19% (RR = 0.81), corresponding to 10% reduced CHD risk (RR = 0.90) for each 5% energy of increased PUFA.

These findings provide evidence that consuming PUFA in place of SFA reduces CHD events in RCTs. This suggests that rather than trying to lower PUFA consumption, a shift toward greater population PUFA consumption in place of SFA would significantly reduce rates of CHD.

References:

Mozaffarian D, Micha R, Wallace S (2010). Effects on Coronary Heart Disease of Increasing Polyunsaturated Fat in Place of Saturated Fat: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. PLoS Med 7(3): e1000252. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000252
The long history of dieting fads: "soap should be eaten for its diuretic properties", wrote a prominent surgeon in 1810. Lancet, 2012.
How We Eat: Analyzing Half a Million Meals - 5 INFOGRAPHICS

Top diets of 2012 - from Cleveland Clinic health blog http://buff.ly/X2I4BJ

Image source: Varieties of meat, Wikipedia, public domain.

Strategies for Increasing Recruitment to Randomised Controlled Trials

Recruitment of participants into randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is critical for successful trial conduct.

396 papers were retrieved and 37 studies were included in this review.

Recruitment strategies that improved recruitment included:

- increased people's awareness of the health problem being studied (e.g., an interactive computer program)
- attendance at an education session
- addition of a health questionnaire or a video about the health condition
- monetary incentives

Increasing patients' understanding of the trial process, recruiter differences, and various methods of randomisation and consent design did not show a difference in recruitment.

References:

Caldwell PHY, Hamilton S, Tan A, Craig JC (2010) Strategies for Increasing Recruitment to Randomised Controlled Trials: Systematic Review. PLoS Med 7(11): e1000368. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000368
Recruiting Study Participants Through Facebook: Epidemiology Study, 2011.
Facebook is cost-effective recruitment source for smokers to complete a survey about tobacco and other substances http://goo.gl/F4Dcb
Image source: picturestation.net, free license.

There are 25,400 scientific journals and their number is increasing by 3.5% a year

More scientific and medical papers are being published now than ever before. Is it possible to be an expert nowadays, asks BMJ.

Every doctor has an ethical duty to keep up to date. Is this just getting more difficult or has it already become impossible? Since Alvin Toffler coined the phrase “information overload” in 1970, the growth of scientific and medical information has been inexorable.

There are now 25 400 journals in science, technology, and medicine, and their number is increasing by 3.5% a year; in 2009, they published 1.5 million articles. PubMed now cites more than 20 million papers.

One response of the medical profession to the increasing scientific basis and clinical capacity of medicine has been to increase subspecialisation. This may restrict the breadth of knowledge of the ultraspecialist, but can such subspecialists still maintain their depth of expertise?

I described my approach in 5 Tips to Stay Up-to-Date with Medical Literature:

1. RSS Feeds for Medical Journals.

2. Podcasts.

3. Persistent Searches on PubMed, Google News and Google.

4. Text-to-speech (TTS) for journal articles.
5. Blogs and Twitter accounts.

If you have a blog or Twitter account, you can try to deal with the information overload from blogs, RSS and Twitter more efficiently by using this:

The circle of online information (click to enlarge).

References:

On the impossibility of being expert. BMJ 2010; 341:c6815 doi: 10.1136/bmj.c6815.

How to deal with the information overload from blogs, RSS and Twitter?

5 Tips to Stay Up-to-Date with Medical Literature
The scientific journal through the centuries - a little bit of history from Health Librarian (HL) Wiki http://buff.ly/WZqP2S

Comments from Twitter:

MediaMed @MediTwitt: Isn't it too much? @DrVes: 25,400 scientific journals and their number is increasing by 3.5% a year buff.ly/OxDvev

Anand Segar @drsegar_nz: that is crazy. Totally unnecessary.