Bad science, new chapters

Jordi Varela
Editor

In July of last year I commented on a work by Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers that concluded that taking into account methodological shortcomings, unpublished studies and poorly explained ones, the waste of biomedical research could be of the order of 85%. According to these authors, only 15% of what is investigated reaches the clinic in conditions of quality and appropriate communication. A little over a year later, other sources insist that biomedical research, in general terms, does not show signs of recovery and, to make it understandable, I will follow the same scheme that I used in the post I have quoted.

The post-hospitalization syndrome

Harlan Krumholz (Yale) is a cardiologist who focuses his research on the impact of health services on health outcomes (Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation - CORE), and on "Post-Hospital Syndrome. An Acquired, Transient Condition of Generalized Risk" focused its attention on readmissions, a problem that affects 20% of people who are discharged in the US. In this context, Krumholz's most prominent finding in the article was that of Jenks and colleagues (with 12 million Medicare discharge records), which enabled them to conclude that patients who had been admitted with decompensations of the most common chronic pathologies: heart failure, pneumonia, COPD or gastrointestinal disorders, if they were readmitted before 30 days, they did so in two-thirds of the time, for reasons other than the diagnosis of the previous admission.