Should We Sweat the Small (Micro) Things?

Should we sweat the small (micro) things?

Thirty years ago, a physician whose patient had diabetes and was urine protein dipstick–positive could only say, “You will most likely progress to end-stage renal disease in 10 years and need dialysis or a kidney transplant, and there is not much we can do about it.” Following the landmark microalbuminuria study of Mogensen and Christensen in 1984 (1 ), clinicians could say to patients with dia...

Why we worry about the things we shouldn't...and ignore the things we should.

It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day. The problems start even before you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40% more common than those that strike later in the day. There's the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that get...

Left Cardiac Sympathetic Denervation: Should We Sweat the Side Effects?

Ten Things We Should Know About Time Series

Time series data affect many aspects of our lives. This paper highlights ten things we should all know about time series, namely: a good working knowledge of econometrics and statistics, an awareness of measurement errors, testing for zero frequency, seasonal and periodic unit roots, analysing fractionally integrated and long memory processes, estimating VARFIMA models, using and interpreting c...

Should we close small ventricular septal defects?

As we race each other to close increasingly smaller holes in the catheterization laboratory, we would do well to remember these wise words of Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, and philosopher who laid the foundation for the modern theory of probability. In this editorial, we aim to look at the existing evidence surrounding the closure of the isolated small ventricular septal defect (VSD), ...