December 5th, 2018Many research studies have reported on the elevated health risk and deviance of youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning (LGBQ). But a study using US national data suggests that many of those estimates may be overstated and that...
November 28th, 2018
Significant doubts have been expressed, as well as international outrage, over unverified claims from a Chinese scientist that he has helped make the world's first genetically edited babies, reports BBC News. Professor He Jiankui says the twin...
September 19th, 2018
A the expulsion of a board member of the Cochrane Collaboration, one of medicine's most respected bodies for its reviews of clinical research, has raised questions on the limits of free speech, when it is perceived to damage an organisation's...
September 12th, 2018
One of the world’s top breast cancer doctors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in recent years, omitting his financial ties from dozens of research articles in prestigious publications like...
September 12th, 2018Treatment decisions during pregnancy are a balancing act that should be informed by available data and expert input, notes an article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Shifting the default from exclusion of pregnant women to a careful...
A substantial proportion of pharmaceutical industry payments to authors of oncology clinical trials published in major scientific journals are not disclosed, research shows. The publications focused on clinical trials that tested new cancer...
August 22nd, 2018
Unpaywall is a free service locates open-access articles and presents paywalled papers that have been legally archived and are freely available on other websites to users who hit a paywalled version. Now, after years of resistance, firms like...
June 20th, 2018The US National Institutes of Health will shut down a controversial industry-funded study of moderate drinking and heart disease after a task force found severe ethical and scientific lapses in the study’s planning and execution. Stat News reports...
Small sample sizes in studies using functional MRI to investigate brain connectivity and function are common in neuroscience, despite years of warnings that such studies likely lack sufficient statistical power.
A new analysis reveals that...
April 18th, 2018Poor animal study design and reporting thwarts the ethical review of proposed human drug trials, according to a study led by researchers at Hannover Medical School in Germany in cooperation with researchers from McGill University, Canada.
The...
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently imposed unusual new requirements on researchers based at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who receive federal funds. Science Mag reports that the changes are a response to concerns over...
March 21st, 2018A University of Surrey study that compares the 5:2 fasting diet with a daily calorie restriction diet and concludes that fasting could have a beneficial impact on some important risk markers for cardiovascular disease, has come under NHS criticsm,...
In recent years, high-profile claims in the academic literature and popular press have alleged that the sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and emphasise instead the dangers of dietary...Research Issues
Warnings to young women who might become pregnant that the epilepsy drug sodium valproate could cause birth defects and developmental problems in their babies could have been made public more than 40 years ago, The Guardian reports UK campaigners...Research Issues
A research review suggests that consuming even small amounts of alcohol in pregnancy may be linked with higher chances of having a small baby and delivering prematurely, but that there were actually very few studies investigating light drinking...Research Issues
Experimental implants that should only have been used in laboratory or animal tests were sent abroad and used on patients who were treated like human guinea pigs, an inquiry at University College London, one of Britain’s leading universities has...
