JAMA Clinical Reviews

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...

Very few people who think they are allergic to penicillin actually are. Yet, even if someone reports a remote and vague history of penicillin allergy, these very useful medications will not be given. This forces many patients to use antibiotics that may be too broad spectrum, not very effective, or expensive. Three major societies have come together to agree on an approach for assessing if penicil...

When flying and they call "Is there a licensed medical professional on board," should physicians respond? If so, what should they do? Are they liable if things go wrong? We interview Christian Martin-Gill, MD, MPH, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, who is an expert on in-flight emergencies and authored a JAMA review on the topic.

The statistical concept of Bayes comes up in clinical medicine all the time. It simply means that what you know about something factors into how you analyze it. This contrasts with the commonly used statistical approach called frequentist analysis of hypothesis testing, in which it is assumed that every situation is unique and not influenced by the past. Bayesian analysis accounts for how prior in...

Within the last 2 years, major guidelines have been issued from US-based and European organizations that differ in their recommendations for the diagnosis and treatment of hypertension. Experts from both sides of the Atlantic--Paul Whelton, MD, from the United States and Bryan Williams, MD, from Europe--discuss the similarities and differences in these guidelines and the basis for the differences....

What is it like to go through alcohol withdrawal at home? What is it like for a mother to sit by her son's side while he goes through withdrawal and supporting him? Why does someone who doesn't have any particular reason to drink misuse alcohol? The answers to these questions can be found by listening to a narrative from one patient and his mother about his descent into alcohol misuse, his experie...

What if the patient you are managing in the ICU is not asleep when you thought they were? Patients relate their very disturbing stories about what they experienced while in an ICU and their treating clinicians thought they were asleep.

Venous thromboembolic disease is common. There are many steps necessary to establish a diagnosis or treat this disease. These are summarized in this JAMA Clinical Reviews podcast and interview with Philip S. Wells, MD, from the Department of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and author of a recent JAMA review on the topic.

Alcohol withdrawal is a serious problem that can lead to mortality. How to predict if it will occur when a patient who is misusing alcohol is admitted to the hospital is challenging. This Rational Clinical Examination article reports results of a systematic review of the literature to determine the best way to predict the occurrence of alcohol withdrawal. Read the article: Will This Hospitalized P...

In 2015, JAMA published results of a randomized clinical trial showing that antibiotic treatment for acute appendicitis was feasible. Doubters of the efficacy of antibiotics for treating appendicitis were concerned about what the long-term recurrence rate would be for those patients treated without surgery. The 5-year results of the study are now presented, showing that only about 40% of patients...

There are new findings about another form of Borrelia: Borrelia miyamotoi. This form of Borrelia causes a relapsing fever but is spread in the same way that Lyme disease is. To help understand these new findings we spoke with Eugene Shapiro, MD, from the Department of Pediatrics and Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale.

In this JAMA Clinical Reviews podcast, we talk to Eugene D. Shapiro, MD, from Yale University School of Medicine for an update on Lyme disease, including new ideas about its diagnosis and treatment.

Syphilis is on the rise despite prior successful efforts to control it. Why is it coming back and what needs to be done about it? Dr Charles Hicks from UC San Diego explains. This podcast coincides with updated syphilis screening recommendations from the USPSTF that were published in the September 4, 2018 issue of JAMA.

Up to 7% of the entire US population has alcohol use disorder. It's important for every clinician to understand how to approach patients to question them about their use of alcohol and to establish a diagnosis when alcohol use disorder is present. Dr Henry Kranzler, from the University of Pennsylvania, is an authority on managing alcohol use disorder and discusses its diagnosis and treatment in th...