Academic Flashcards
Tell us about a paper you’ve read recently.
Journal: British Journal of Haematology - peer-reviewed, high impact factor.
PICO: Retrospective cohort study of ~ 600 patients in ‘training’ set from a national database with childhood AML and used multivariate analysis to determine the relevance of factors such as age, cancer genomics and molecular disease levels to overall survival. This was used to develop a tool to establish risk profile for individual patients, and this was then validated using ~200 of their own patients with childhood AML. Interestingly, this study also showed that patients in the lower risk group did not appear to benefit from HSCT.
Bias: Did not discuss how the patients were recruited - ? selection bias. Also, patients with M3 disease were excluded from the validation cohort but not the validation cohort - ? publication bias.
Strengths and weaknesses: Large cohort and sound statistical analysis. Could be very clinically significant, although there may be elements of bias there.
Validity: Good internal validity, with exploration of confounding variables and sound statistical analysis. External validity would be the next step ie. can this be validated using an independent cohort by another research group?
Clinical significance: Interesting study - risk tool may be useful in the future for counselling families and also guiding treatment. However, would need further studies supporting it before it was implemented in clinical practice.
