Cochrane Library Podcasts

The Cochrane Library contains many reviews relevant to the management of low back pain, one of the common health problems in the world. This includes reviews of what to look out for when someone presents with low back pain and the review of red flags that would highlight the need to screen for a spinal fracture was updated in August 2023. Here’s Chris Han from the Institute for Musculoskeletal Health and the University of Sydney in Australia to describe the latest findings.

We’re all probably familiar with physical first aid, but there is also something called mental health first aid and a new Cochrane review was published in August 2023, looking at the evidence on its effects. In this podcast, Roses Parker, Cochrane's Commissioning Editor, talks with two co-authors, Rachel Richardson who leads the Methods Support Unit in Cochrane and George Wellby who works as a psychiatric registrar in London, UK, about the review.

A variety of drugs are used for people with panic disorder and the effects of these were brought together in November 2023 in a Cochrane review and network meta-analysis by Giuseppe Guaiana from Western University in St Thomas Canada and a large group of international authors. Here's Giuseppe to tell us about the problem, and whether these drug treatments are helpful.

Taking over as the Cochrane Review with the most included studies when it was updated in November 2023, is the Cochrane Methodology Review of strategies to improve the response rates for postal and web questionnaires. Here's lead author, Phil Edwards from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, to outline the importance of the review and its latest findings.

About one in ten live births around the world are preterm and many very preterm babies will develop respiratory distress soon after birth and require help with their breathing. Various strategies are available for this and an updated Cochrane review from July 2023 provides the latest evidence on the early use of nasal intermittent positive pressure ventilation compared with nasal continuous positive airway pressure. We asked one of the authors, Marc-Olivier Deguise from the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Canada to tell us about the findings, and he used ElevenLabs to make this recording.

About one in ten live births around the world are preterm and many of these babies will develop respiratory distress and require help with their breathing. Various strategies are available for this and an updated Cochrane review from July 2023 provides the latest evidence on the comparison of nasal intermittent positive pressure ventilation versus nasal continuous positive airway pressure when a baby’s breathing tube is removed. We asked one of the authors, Marc-Olivier Deguise from the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Canada to tell us about the findings, and he used ElevenLabs to make this recording.

Alongside the many thousands of Cochrane reviews of the effects of health care interventions, is a review of decision aids that might help people make decisions about treatment or screening. This was first published in January 2003 and the fifth update has been published 21 years later. Here's the current lead author, Dawn Stacey from the University of Ottawa and Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Canada, who's been working on the review for all that time to tell us about the need for the review and its latest findings.

Before its closure in 2023, the Cochrane Injuries Group worked on more than 150 reviews and one of these, on interventions to encourage the use of seat belts was published in January 2024. Here's the lead author, Andrit Lourens from the Namibia University of Science and Technology to tell us about the findings.

Cochrane has produced more than a dozen systematic reviews of the effects of interventions that might help children who have chronic pain and their parents. In October 2023, these were added to with a review of qualitative research that had explored the experiences and views of children and their families about chronic non-cancer pain and pain services and treatments. In this podcast, Roses Parker, Cochrane's Commissioning Editor, talks with lead author Emma France, an associate professor in health research at the University of Stirling in the UK, about the review and its findings.

Among the nearly 100 reviews produced by the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group, their review of the use of electronic cigarettes in smoking cessation is now being managed as a living systematic review, with monthly searches to keep an eye on the evidence base, so that the published review can be refreshed as necessary. The review was re-badged as a living review in 2021 and its fourth update in this format was published in January 2024. Here's one of the authors, Ailsa Butler from the University of Oxford in the UK to summarise the latest findings.