Medical royal colleges ‘receive millions from drug and medical devices companies’

Royal colleges in the UK have received more than £9 million in marketing payments from drug and medical devices companies since 2015, but do not always disclose the payments publicly, finds an...

The hidden risks of fluoroquinolones

A study published late last year in the British Medical Journal (Wang et al, 2022) evaluated the association between the initiation of fluoroquinolones and admissions to hospitals or emergency...

Opioids and prescribing

This retrospective cohort study, published in the journal Lancet Public Health online sought to identify mortality amongst people prescribed opioid agonist therapy in Scotland between the years 2011...

More than one in six unvaccinated people report health effects of COVID-19 2 years after infection, study finds

‘Understanding the trajectory of symptom burden and recovery from long COVID is crucial for policy making, treatment decisions, and care co-ordination’ .

Statin prescribing practice

This article in the journal JAMA Cardiology presents the findings of a cluster randomised clinical trial involving 4131 patients from 28 primary care practices and 158 clinicians between October 2019...

Examining sustainable practice in prescribing

This article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, sought to identify the barriers to prescribing more environmentally friendly inhalers (Parker, 2023). One of the drivers for this article was...

Machine learning for precision treatment

Sotomi et al (2023) examine the use of machine learning to identify cohorts of a population that may benefit from specific medications. The team had previously established a machine learning-based...

Examining prescribing in children and adolescents

This cohort study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal, aimed to identify trends in antipsychotic drug prescribing to children and adolescents in England (Radojčić et al, 2023). This was driven...

Prescribing during pregnancy

This article was published in BMC Medicine, used a retrospective cohort study approach to examine data between 2000 and 2019 (Subramanian et al, 2023). The author's main driver to conduct this...

Research to support diabetes remission in general practice

Diabetes UK (2023), together with the American Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, defines remission as HbA1c levels remaining below 48 mmol/mol or 6.5% for...

Pharmacy survey - win £100 gift vouchers

Past the peak: navigating depression in the aftermath of COVID-19

Depression was already one of the commonest mental disorders in Great Britain, but new research has shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an increase of mental distress in adults across the...