Cochrane Library Podcasts

If we want to know whether two treatments are different, the best way to find out is to randomise patients to one or the other, and to compare their outcomes. The sooner this is done after the introduction of a new treatment, the better. The sooner that patients, practitioners and policy makers will have an answer. Andy Molyneux, a neuroradiologist from Oxford in England describes how this was done for a particular type of stroke and how it has transformed care and changed lives.

Clinical trials provide practitioners with some of the information they need to help the people they are working with make well informed decisions about their care. We asked Valerie Smith, a midwife from Dublin in Ireland to tell us how trials have helped her, and changed her life and that of others.

Clinical trials have answered many important questions in health and social care over recent decades, improving the lives of countless millions of people; but research is still needed to the best ways to do them. Mike Clarke, from the MRC Hub for Trials Methodology Research, based at Queen’s University in Belfast Northern Ireland describes how SWATs (Studies Within A Trial) might help.

Seborrhoeic dermatitis is a chronic inflammatory skin condition, affecting a few people in every 100. A May 2014 Cochrane Review assesses the effects of topical pharmacological interventions, and the findings are discussed in this podcast by Jos Verbeek from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Kuopio.

Approximately 1 baby in every 5000 is born with haemophilia A and 1 in 30,000 births have haemophilia B. In a new Cochrane Review in April 2014, Abha Athale and colleagues from McMaster University in Canada examined the effects of immune tolerance induction and she tells us what they found in this Evidence Pod.

Alongside research on the impact of different types of health and social care, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews contains research on the impact of different types of research. An April 2014 Cochrane Methodology Review does this by examining the evidence on how the design chosen for a study might influence the answer it gets. Andy Anglemyer from the University of California in San Francisco USA tells us what they found.

For the last few years, Cochrane Overviews have been bringing together the findings of a number of Cochrane Reviews into a single document, making it easier for people to find the evidence they need. Like Cochrane Reviews more generally, these are also updated periodically, and Sophie Hill, Coordinating Editor of the Cochrane Consumers and Communication Group based in Australia, describes the April 2014 update of her Group’s overview of consumer-oriented interventions for evidence-based prescribing and medicines use.

Many people experience chronic pain, and the Cochrane Pain, Palliative and Supportive Care Group (PaPaS) have produced a large collection of related reviews. In April 2014, one of these has been updated, looking at the effects of non-invasive brain simulation on pain. Neil O’Connell from Brunel University in England led the review and describes the findings.