Small sample, but a promising intervention. It would be nice to see more standardization of pre- and pro-biotic supplements so that consumers could do a little self-experimentation.
If I am reading this correctly, it looks like controls differed significantly at baseline from the intervention group for 30-year CVD risk, which calls the validity of the results into question. It also looks like the intervention group had significantly greater self-perception at basline, although it is hard to tell exactly as the lower bar of the confidence interval is indistinguishable from the background color and no numbers are provided for this measure.
Really, BMJ? This is not medical, except for being written by a surgeon, and it has not aged well. Perhaps people are scowling at this doc for a reason other than the dogs.
Hotels are perceived as being cleaner than AirBnb homes? Hmmmm. Highly influenced by the "clean" appearance of lots of non-porous surfaces and assumptions about commercial laundries, I suspect.
Presaging Airbnb's efforts to house first responders during the pandemic. Unfortunately, it ran right into the need on the part of some hosts to make up for lost income through increasing or even starting their home-based hospitality business. Federal funding for such efforts might be a solution.
The elevated risk found in this study of Chinese individuals reveals a quite different pattern observed among European and US subkects (e.g. Guo et al 2017 and Mullie et al 2016).
While it is true that such a transformation would require "time, training, research, and education," these would be resources well invested if ". . . researchers would be required to identify, understand and include appropriate scientific and ethics evidence in support of their protocol." In my experience, there is next to no substantive discussion about these issues as research teams try to figure out how to get their IRB packets approved with the minimum of time and effort. IRB is often seen as an annoying piece of bureaucracy rather than assistance with making research the most rigorous and ethical it can be.
I am puzzled why journals have been so slow to adopt STROBE and similar guidelines--it seems like it would be a great benefit to insist on standards that improve the quality of manuscripts accepted for publication. Certainly my own experience submitting manuscripts for publication and reviewing others' suggests that, even when the guidelines are in the journal's instructions, they are not provided to reviewers and they are not insisted on.
Important: "previous work has shown no clear benefit in newly treated type 2 diabetes patients on oral therapy." Anecdotally, physicians, nurses, and diabetes educators struggle to explain exactly how self-monitoring lowers blood glucose; often the only explanation given is something about identifying low-glucose events. Insurers often offer no choice about which type of monitor's supplies they will cover, making it impossible to purchase the least costly monitoring system.
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