The Behind the Headlines 2013's Top Five of Top Fives

As we move towards the end of the year, like all news sources, we fall back on that classic space filler – the list story. So without further ado, here is the official Behind the Headlines Top Five of Top Fives stories of 2013.   The top five "Good work team!" stories of the year We can often get bogged down in pointing out dodgy sub-group analyses, spurious extrapolations of samples sizes containing just four men and a dog, and RCTs pointing out the benefits of chocolate on blood pressure that turned out to be funded by a chocolate-making conglomerate. So it's important not to lose sight of the fact that there are many hardworking researchers, producing invaluable work, framed in the best traditions of evidence-based medicine, that does make the world a better place. Here’s our top five of the year: New malaria vaccine could save millions of lives As much of the health news we read is dominated by lifestyle-related diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, it’s easy to overlook the real killers, such as malaria. This deadly disease kills over 600,000 people annually, most of them children. Encouragingly, US researchers may have come up with a workable vaccine against Plasmodium falciparum – the most deadly of the malaria-causing parasites. It’s early stages, but possibly an exciting development. "Historic breakthrough" in Alzheimer's research In October the media rightly reported on a historic breakthrough into a potential treatment and pos...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: QA articles Medical practice Source Type: news