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This is a personal, informal and non-sponsored commentary on papers recently published by the Italian biomedical research community.
The purpose is to draw attention not only to good Italian research,
but also to examples of good scientific reporting and publishing practices.
The selection of articles is purely subjective, but your suggestions are most welcome. Write to me, Valerie Matarese, Ph.D. at vmatarese @ uptoit.org (copies of non-OA papers are welcome).
This is a free, occasional service of Up To it!
Up To it! Home > Italian biomedical research highlights > November 2008
An important Italian contribution to the evidence-based literature is a new set of practice guidelines for the clinical management of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The work was carried out by an expert panel of hematologists and other clinicians representing three associations: Italian Society of Hematology (SIE), Italian Society of Experimental Hematology (SIES), and Italian Group for Bone Marrow Transplantation. This new paper recently appeared in Haematologica (PMID: 19001282), where these same associations have already published eight other guidelines since 2004, i.e. following development of the COGS checklist for standardized reporting of clinical practice guidelines. This is an impressive achievement, considering that altogether there are 35 Italian practice guidelines indexed in PubMed in this same period. Furthermore, all nine Haematologica guidelines are open access.
The paper discusses the initial assessment of patients and the available treatments: induction therapy, consolidation chemotherapy and stem cell transplantation. The approach used to develop the AML guidelines was systematic and clearly documented, and included reaching a consensus according to the Delphi method (an iterative process involving a panel of geographically distant experts who fill out a series of questionnaires: the responses to one questionnaire are summarized anonymously and used to generate the next; the procedure is repeated until consensus is reached.) Moreover, the recommendations were scored according to the strength of the evidence as suggested by the Scottish Intercollegiate Guideline Network. Posted 20 November 2008.
Two papers from the first week of November caught my attention. First, Italian researchers working with colleagues
from Germany, Canada and the US studied the cell biology of tumor-initiating cells; their work is freely available under the PNAS open access option (PMID: 18957543). The senior author, Dr. R. Dulbecco, contributed the paper as member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Among the authors whose hands did the work were three graduate students from the University
of Milan who took my course Effective Biomedical Reading and Writing:
an excellent way for them to begin their
publishing career! This paper describes the morphological and histological features of three distinct
populations of cells derived from rat cancer stem cells, and the authors propose that their cell system will
facilitate the study of tumorigenesis.
The second paper of interest is a cost-effectiveness analysis of therapies for psoriatic arthritis, carried out by researchers in 10 cities throughout Italy and published in Rheumatology (PMID: 18725374). The authors noted that their pharmacoeconomic analysis of three anti-TNFalpha
agents (etanercept, infliximab and adalimumab) is the first to be done prospectively, in clinical
practice, involving 107 patients. In addition, they took an unusual analytical approach, comparing costs and utility
of traditional therapy (before enrollment) to those of active immunotherapy (during the trial). The immunotherapies
were more costly, as expected, but they were associated with a better quality of life; probability analysis showed
that the therapies were likely to be considered cost-effective within acceptable limits of willingness-to-pay.
Posted 10 November 2008
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