British journal of anaesthesia
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Reproducibility of research is poor; this may be because many articles report statistically significant findings that are false positives. Two potential solutions are to lower the P-value for statistical significance testing from 0.05 to 0.005 and to report the minimum false-positive risk (minFPR). This study determined these metrics for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in general anaesthesiology journals. ⋯ These proposed metrics aimed at mitigating reproducibility concerns would call a significant portion of the anaesthesiology literature into question. We found a minFPR of 22% and determined that 42% of primary outcomes would not maintain statistical significance if the P-value threshold changed from 0.05 to 0.005. These findings could partially explain the lack of reproducibility of research findings.
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Editorial Comment
Incremental advances will improve medical device alarm sounds.
The March issue contains a laboratory study of auditory perception, which is an unusual topic for this journal. A perspective is provided on how the study relates to recent research on clinical auditory alarms and displays. Techniques used in the study are explored and explained, such as enrolment of non-clinician volunteer participants, use of coordinate response measure phrase stimuli, presentation of sound loudness levels using the decibel scale, and analysis using signal detection theory. Such efforts to improve the safety, efficacy, and tolerability of modern medical device alarms are critical for improved patient safety.
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Editorial Comment
Opioids and autism spectrum disorder: liaisons dangereuses?
A recent laboratory study in the Journal examined the effects of repeated exposures of neonatal mice to fentanyl on autism-like behaviour via opioid receptor-mediated DNA hypermethylation of the Grin2B gene, which encodes the GluN2B subunit of the NMDA receptor. These experiments provide mechanisms and biological plausibility but do not directly demonstrate that opioid exposure in early life induces autism spectrum disorder in humans. Experimental modelling of human neuropsychiatric disorders is extremely challenging since most subjective psychiatric symptoms used to establish diagnosis in humans cannot be convincingly ascertained in laboratory rodents. While some human epidemiological data show associations between repeated exposures to opioids during early life, it remains undetermined whether opioid exposure is an independent risk factor for developing autism spectrum disorder in the young.