Cochrane Library Podcasts

The Cochrane Stroke Group are one of the older Cochrane Review Groups and have built up a strong portfolio of reviews covering all aspects of stroke care. They have now started to produce Overviews, bringing together the findings of multiple reviews. Alex Pollock from the Scottish Government funded Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professional Research Unit at Glasgow Caledonian University in the UK discusses the November 2014 publication of the first of these, on improving arm function after stroke.

The Cochrane Musculoskeletal Group are producing a series of reviews of exercise interventions for people with the painful condition, fibromyalgia. The latest of these was published in October 2014 and examines the evidence on water-based exercise. In this podcast, Teresa Ross from the Exercise for Fibromyalgia Review Team describes the condition and this type of treatment.

In a new Cochrane Methodology Review in October 2014, Matthew Page and colleagues examine the evidence on selective reporting within systematic reviewers. Matt, who is based in the School of Public Health & Preventive Medicine at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia describes the problems that they identified in this Evidence Pod.

It is widely recognised that more emphasis needs to be given to the role of the patient in making decisions about their health care. But what should we do to help make this happen? Some of the answers are in the September 2014 update of a Cochrane Review on shared decision making and the lead author, France Legare from Université Laval in Québec Canada, tells us why she did the review and what they found.

Alongside the thousands of Cochrane Reviews on treatments for diseases, we have many reviews investigating other aspects of wellbeing, including some relating to occupational health. One of these, published in August 2014, looks at sleep problems caused by shift work. Jos Verbeek from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki outlines the findings and conclusions.

Cochrane celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2013, and one review that’s as old as the Collaboration looks at a particular treatment for stroke, called thrombolysis. The latest update was published in July 2014 and is described by lead author, Joanna Wardlaw, from the University of Edinburgh in the UK.

Trastuzumab has been recognised as an effective therapy for women with HER2 positive breast cancer for several years, and a Cochrane Review on the effects for women with early stage disease was published in 2012. This was joined in June 2014 by a review of the drug’s effects for more advanced cancer. Sara Balduzzi from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy describes these findings.

In December 2012, a Cochrane Review brought together the results of clinical trials that had looked at the effects of blood-clot promoting drugs on patients who were bleeding. The review was dominated by the large, CRASH-2 trial. In this podcast, Mike Clarke speaks with Ian Roberts, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in England, about both the trial and the review.

Eating more fruits and vegetables can have beneficial effects on health, but the UK population as a whole doesn’t meet the current dietary guidelines. Clinical trials help to show the effects of different diets but they also have spin off benefits, as Jayne Woodside, Professor of Human Nutrition at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland explains.

Dozens of Cochrane Reviews explore the effects of treatments for asthma, both routine and emergency. One of these was updated in May 2014 to bring in the most recent evidence on the use of magnesium. Kayleigh Kew and Liza Kirtchuk from St George's at the University of London in England describe what they found, starting with Kayleigh.