trials and tribulations

I went to a really inspiring seminar yesterday, given by Sir Iain Chalmers, who has been (to mention one of his achievements) director of the Cochrane collaboration. He talked about lots of really important topics in healthcare. One that I was particularly interested in, since it is close to my area of research, was his discussion of research synthesis in reports of clinical trials. For a long time he has been arguing that research papers describing clinical trials should put their results in the context of previous research, including a research synthesis (or meta-analysis) to update existing knowledge with the new evidence gained from the trial being reported. To someone not involved in clinical research this may not seem a terribly important matter. But here is just one of the examples (and a particularly heart-rending one) that he gave of how this might have helped in the past. For a long time parents were advised to let babies sleep on their fronts, until evidence came to light of an increased risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in babies sleeping in this position. Trials were carried out as early as the 1970's, and if a systematic research synthesis had been conducted after each trial this fact would have been recognised much earlier, potentially saving the lives of thousands of babies. Even though the seminar room was packed with people, you could have heard a pin drop at this point. It really brought home to me how incredibly important is all the work being done in this area, and how much I love being a part of that (even a very small one!)