John Pickering

I wonder if it is a typo - I see that 52% was also the number given as the proportion of patients in the Vit D arm that needed 5000IU daily doses to reach the target blood concentration.

There is something wrong with this claim. The rates of events were 15.7% in the vit D group & 18.4% in standard care a 14.6% or 2.7 percentage pts reduction. Either these rates are wrong or the 52% reduction claim is.

Funny you say that. ~25 years ago & had a qn asked along similar lines about politicians simultaneously in a church & in a mall about a km apart. Most mall goers didn't think home behaviour mattered for the politician to do their job.
Simply, you were old fashioned even then Richard. 🙂

Maybe because they are busy sending emails out to potential reviewers of the data asking them to give their time for free.

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If you're not in Christchurch, you're missing out! Come join the busiest emergency department in Australasia (Southern Hemisphere?) with incomparable small-city quality of life.

"Fellow" positions open for applications for 2026:
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In case you missed this late-breaker at #AHA25. ICare-FASTER showed that the introduction of a high-sensitive Point-of-care troponin assay in 6 emergency departments (n=60,000) was safe & reduced length of stay. #EMSky #CardioSky

Sorry @erictopol.bsky.social it doesn't. All participants were normal coffee drinkers. Therefore, the coffee-drinker arm is the Control arm. The intervention of going cold turkey increased the hazard of AF by 64% (100/0.61). The whole report is written from the wrong perspective.

Please revisit this. The paper & media have the statistics around the wrong way. All participants normally drank coffee. This makes the coffee drinking group the Control arm & those who went cold turkey the Intervention arm. Correctly: Going cold turkey increased the hazard for recurrent AF by 64%!

Please revisit this. The paper & media have the statuistics around the wrong way. All participants normally drank coffee. This makes the coffee drinking group the control arm & those who went cold turkey the intervention arm. Correctly: Going cold turkey increased the hazard for recurrent AF by 64%!

Please don't say this. The paper has it all around the wrong way. The coffee drinkers were the Control group. The Intervention was going cold-turkey. So, NOT coffee may be beneficial, rather going cold turkey may be detrimental (64% increased in hazard).

This is shockingly poor science reporting. All participants normally drank coffee. The control was drink coffee as normal. The intervention was go cold turkey. Therefore the conclusion should be that going cold turkey increased the hazard of recurrent AF by 64%.
Advise people NOT to go cold turkey

Wow-media (& paper) about DECAF #AF trial have it totally the wrong way around.
Control = coffee drinkers [usual behaviour]
Intervention = Going cold turkey
Therefore correct interpretation is: "Going cold turkey on coffee may increase AF rate, HR 1.6(95%CI 1.1 to 2.4)"
#AHA25 #CardioSky

So, stopping drinking coffee is harmful?

Or is that #AHA25? Both hashtags seem to be in use.

At #AHA2025? I would love a photo of Martin Than presenting our ICare-FASTER point of care #troponin #EMsky trial results as a late-breaker at 09:24 on Sunday (session FS.05).
The culmination of a 7.5y project. 60,000 patients, hundreds of staff.
Thanks
#CardioSky
ps. the results are worth the wait

A medical physicist’s deep dive into the history of X-rays in New Zealand has uncovered that not only is the oldest New Zealand X-ray in existence in Christchurch, its subject - a native frog - is also still floating around after 130 years.

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NZ researchers honoured for their transformative health interventions | Flipboard hrc.govt.nz - The Health Research Council (HRC) has honoured an outstanding group of researchers at the Royal Society Te Apārangi’s Research Honours event in …

I love it when collogues of mine from University of Otago Christchurch get well deserved recognition. flip.it/jdVlx9 Well done Logan... Lilly medallist. #NZ #Genetics #Cancer @universityofotago.bsky.social

Help! Journal Publisher websites like the European Heart Journal are now putting the annoying Cookies message up on every page!
Any plugins (Safari) for automatically Rejecting All?
#Academia #Journals

Good catch Grant - I was wondering why it was not as windy as forecast here #Oct23Storm

And the lone one in Southern Marlborough just north of Kaikoura is really a kite surfer who is now at 15,000 feet. #Oct23Storm

View north above #Christchurch from a weather station at 1003 this morning (a few mins ago). Now >50km/h sustained winds there. Hold on to your hats folks. #Oct23Storm

It can be "interesting"... I built a house with 55% thicker walls than normal & I can hear the wind starting up again. I feel sorry for the folk with the standard walls...going to get noisy.

Hope all fellow #Christchurch folk have the hatches battened down for the #Oct23Storm. We've just had a period of calm up on Westmorland. But at the v top of Marley Hill a gust hit 93 km/h at 8:43 this morning (check out the Attentis app). More coming!

AI company will pay authors $1.5 billion in damages after using their copyrighted works to train its models Academics set for payouts of $3000 for each book that was illegally downloaded

Anthropic #AI just got pinged for US$1.5bn for nicking stuff from authors. $3K per book. Check the list: secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup
SadlyI don't hold the #copyright for the only one I contributed to (ironically an article on plagiarism).
www.chemistryworld.com/news/ai-comp...

Ahh, Richard, I see you were very careful not to state that "inflation runs at faster than the speed of light"

High-sens POC troponin assays have potential to reduce ED LOS for chest pain patients - but are they safe? When used within an ESC-type pathway, POC hs-TnI ruled out MI in 32% patients after a single test, with 100% sensitivity doi.org/10.1111/1742... @emajournal.bsky.social

Yes it is difficult! I've just put them in the supplement to a major paper. My clinical colleagues said "I don't understand" when I put just one S value (alongside the p-value) in the main text . Unfortunately, I couldn't get them all in a room & not allow them to leave before they understood.

I agree with this ... I teach never to make dynamite plots simply because they give the wrong impression of data from the bottom of the plot to the mean/median and not much above it.

2. Get Nobel in Phys. ❌ 😞