METHODS: PubMed case reports data from 2011 to 2016 were extracted for the Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and New England Journal of Medicine. The gender of the patients were identified and a text analysis of the Medical Subject Headings conducted.
RESULTS: A total of 2,742 case reports were downloaded and 2,582 (95.6%) reports contributed to the final analysis. A pooled analysis showed a statistically significant gender bias against female case reports (0.45; 95%CI: 0.43-0.47). The Annals of Internal Medicine was the only journal with a point estimate (non significant) in the direction of a bias against male patients. The text analysis identified no substantive difference in the focus of the case reports and no obvious explanation for the bias.
CONCLUSION: Gender bias, previously identified in clinical research and in clinical authorship, extends into the patients presented in clinical case reports. Whether it is driven by authors or editors is not clear, but it likely contributes to and supports an overall male bias of clinical medicine.
DESIGN: Using data from the 2011-2012 US National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, we examined the relationship between HbA1c and a single fasting measure of blood glucose in a non-clinical population of people with known diabetes (n=333). A linear equation for estimating HbA1c from blood glucose was developed. Appropriate blood glucose cut-off values were set for poor glycaemic control (HbA1c≥69.4 mmol/mol).
RESULTS: The HbA1c and blood glucose measures were well correlated (r=0.7). Three blood glucose cut-off values were considered for classifying poor glycaemic control: 8.0, 8.9, and 11.4 mmol/L. A blood glucose of 11.4 had a specificity of 1, but poor sensitivity (0.37); 8.9 had high specificity (0.94) and moderate sensitivity (0.7); 8.0 was associated with good specificity (0.81) and sensitivity (0.75).
CONCLUSIONS: Where HbA1c measurement is too expensive for community surveillance, a single blood glucose measure may be a reasonable alternative. Generalising the specific results from these US data to low resource settings may not be appropriate, but the general approach is worthy of further investigation.
METHODS: Behavioural Risk Factors Surveillance System data were used to estimate the weight the US population needed to lose to achieve a BMI
METHODS AND ANALYSIS: A serial cross-sectional design will be combined with a two-point in time longitudinal design to measure the levels of stigma among healthcare students from each year of undergraduate and graduate courses in Malaysia and Australia. In the absence of suitable measures, we will carry out a sequential mixed methods design to develop such a tool. The questionnaire data will be analysed using mixed effects linear models to manage the repeated measures.
ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: We have received ethical approval from the Monash MBBS executive committee as well as the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee. We will keep the data in a locked filing cabinet in the Monash University (Sunway campus) premises for 5 years, after which the information will be shredded and disposed of in secure bins, and digital recordings will be erased in accordance with Monash University's regulations. Only the principal investigator and the researcher will have access to the filing cabinet. We aim to present and publish the results of this study in national and international conferences and peer-reviewed journals, respectively.