JAMA Clinical Reviews

Jennifer A. Ligibel, MD, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, explains how obesity influences the risk of developing cancer and how it influences the prognosis of existing cancer.

Dr. Eduardo Bruera, Chair of the Department of Palliative Care at MD Anderson, discusses how to responsibly manage cancer pain using opioids.

Menopause is inevitable for women. It symptoms are uncomfortable and distressing. For women to best cope with menopause, it is useful to firmly establish the onset so that appropriate counseling can follow. In this podcast, an expert in this field, Nanette Santoro, MD, from the University of Colorado, explains how to diagnose menopause. Read the article: Diagnosing the Onset of Menopause

Using firearms to commit suicide is one of the most common causes of firearm related deaths. This can happen even in families where it seems highly unlikely to occur. In this podcast, we tell the story of a policeman's daughter who got a hold of his gun and tried to kill herself.

Subclinical hypothyroidism is common, but it is not clear how best to treat it. Anne R. Cappola, MD, ScM, professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how to manage this important clinical condition. Read the article: Subclinical Hypothyroidism: A Review  

There are now 36 states and recent federal legislation that require that clinicians inform women about breast density results from mammography. Consequently, clinicians must be aware of the clinical ramifications of dense breasts and what to do about them when found. Karla Kerlikowske, MD, from UCSF explains the risks associated with dense breasts and how to manage patients who have them. CME will...

California enacted 3 aggressive laws between 2014 and 2016 in an effort to improve measles vaccination rates. To a large extent these laws were effective in increasing vaccination rates, but some of the improvements were offset by clinicians granting inappropriate medical exemptions for vaccinations. S. Cassandra Pingali, MPH, MS, and Saad B. Omer, MBBS, MPH, PhD, from the Department of Epidemiolo...

A conversation with Greg Curfman, MD, JAMA Deputy Editor and a cardiologist, who reviews 2 new studies showing that a short duration of dual antiplatelet therapy may not result in more myocardial ischemic events. Read the article: Effect of 1-Month Dual Antiplatelet Therapy Followed by Clopidogrel vs 12-Month Dual Antiplatelet Therapy on Cardiovascular and Bleeding Events in Patients Receiving PCI...

Over the span of less than a minute, a gunman with a history of mental health issues turned a Safeway parking lot into the scene of a mass shooting, killing 6 and wounding 13 in 20 seconds. In this inaugural episode of the In Our Lane podcast series, we hear the stories of the survivors who wrestled the gunman to the ground and treated the injured during the wait for first responders.

Andrew M. Kaunitz, MD, from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Florida, Jacksonville, explains how to diagnose and treat various patterns of abnormal uterine bleeding. Read the article: Abnormal Uterine Bleeding in Reproductive-Age Women  

Jan L. Shifren, MD, from the department of obstetrics and gynecology, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School discusses menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes and how they can be effectively treated by the administration of hormones when given appropriately. Read the article: Menopausal Hormone Therapy CME will be available on June 25 when this article appears in the print edit...

George F. Sawaya, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, discusses cervical cancer screening in the modern era. Read the article: Cervical Cancer Screening: More Choices in 2019 Read the transcript  

Breast cancer outcomes continue to improve. Treatments for the disease are very effective and continually evolving. We spoke with Patricia A. Ganz, MD, from UCLA about what is new in breast cancer treatment. Read the article here.

Dr Carolyn Crandall, professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and JAMA Associate Editor, introduces JAMA's new series of articles on women's health.

Congressman Mike Thompson chairs the US House Gun Violence Prevention Taskforce. He spoke with us about what the House has done to address gun violence and what you can do to help them see necessary legislation make it into law. We also talk with Joshua Sharfstein, MD, about strategies that can be undertaken by the physician community to reduce gun violence.

Maternal mortality rates in most of the United States are high. These rates were successfully lowered in the United Kingdom and also in California. Many of these deaths are preventable. In this podcast we interview Elizabeth A. Howell, MD, MPP, from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai in New York, who explains the relatively simple ways to address this problem. See related article .

Almost nothing is more controversial than gun control in the United States. Yet while passions flare and legislators posture but do little, deaths from gun violence are all too common. Almost every proposal put forward to address gun violence eventually fails. Seemingly, the Second Amendment stops any attempt to control guns. Despite this, there have been commonsense approaches to reducing gun vio...

Cardiologist and JAMA Deputy Editor Greg Curfman, MD, discusses the many changes in the new AHA/ACC/HRS atrial fibrillation guidelines with University of Chicago cardiologists Gaurav Upadhyay, MD, and Francis Alenghat, MD, PhD. Major changes include recommendations for the use of various agents for anticoagulation, catheter ablation, and left atrial appendage occlusion. Read the article: Managemen...

Almost nothing is more controversial than gun control in the United States. Yet while passions flare and legislators posture but do little, deaths from gun violence are all too common. Almost every proposal put forward to address gun violence eventually fails. Seemingly, the Second Amendment stops any attempt to control guns. Despite this, there have been commonsense approaches to reducing gun vio...

COPD is common enough that it is responsible for 3% of all clinic visits in the United States. Clinicians will undoubtedly deal with this disease in their practice. How to diagnose and manage it is reviewed by Frank C. Sciurba, MD, a professor of medicine from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Great controversy exists regarding the safety of surgery when the attending surgeon allows someone else to perform parts of the operation. These practices are necessary components of surgical training, but how safe this is for patients remains unknown. In this podcast we discuss the risks and benefits associated with overlapping and concurrent surgery with a recognized expert in this topic, Michel...

Next-generation sequencing is a catchall term for new, high-throughput technologies that allow rapid sequencing of a full genome. It can be used to sequence a patient's DNA in diagnosing a genetic disorder or characterizing a cancer, but can also be used to sequence the genome of a pathogenic bacteria, virus, fungi, or parasites. In this JAMA clinical review podcast, we talk with authors Marta Gwi...

E-values are a new tool that enables investigators to estimate the likelihood that some unmeasured confounder might overcome seemingly positive results. They are very easy to calculate and any reader of the medical literature can do this calculation to get a sense for how likely it is that there is some unmeasured factor in an observational study that might negate otherwise seemingly positive find...

Saved by a Fitbit. Technology is developing at a pace far exceeding its application in medical care. An exception is in consumer devices, which as long as they do not hold themselves out as diagnostic tools, can apply as many technologies to wearable devices as companies want to put into them. In this episode we discuss how a clinician used a wearable device to diagnose his father's rapid heart ra...

Breast cancer screening is debated passionately among those who advocate for very aggressive screening and other experts who believe that screening can be harmful. The arguments for all sides of the debate are best understood by knowing the numbers of women who will benefit or be harmed by breast cancer screening. Both sides of the debate are explained in this podcast by Nancy Keating, MD, and Lyd...