Author: Joel Topf

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Resident lecture on NAGMA

One hour lecture on NAGMA. Just some small changes edits from the last time I gave it. It is one of the few lectures that is still in PowerPoint. It is due for a complete overhaul. It also needs a slide on the treatment of RTA that covers the amount of bicarbonate in a 650 mg tablet (8 mmol) and the fact that distal (type 1) RTA requires a limited amount of bicarbonate (at most 1 mmol/kg). This is appropriate for residents and medical students.

If you are interested in ward teaching and RTA, take a look at this post by Robert Centor.

Also this is a nice article on the issue of saline having a pH of 5.5, covering both the reason (its the PVC bag) and the implications (none).

NAGMA (PPT)

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My SGLT2 inhibitor grand-rounds lecture

This past autumn I was invited to give a lecture at the Michigan ACP. I love that meeting. I decided to talk about the mortality data on SGLT2 inhibitors and how we got that data and how curious that data is. Then, last week I had the opportunity to give the lecture again for grand rounds at St John Hospital and Medical Center. Here it is in 4 chapters:

Chapter 1: The History and top line CV outcomes

Chapter 2: What’s driving the improvement in outcomes?

Chapter 3: Renal outcomes

Chapter 4: Side effects and conclusions

Here is the Keynote presentation for your editing pleasure: Keynote (278 mb)

In response to chapter 2, Matt Sparks had this interesting tweet:

This brings up an important point. One of the most intriguing slides is the one below that looks at how long it takes for the Kaplan-Meier to separate.

With glycemic control and blood pressure interventions, their is notable lag, but with the SGLT2i drugs the lines diverge from the very first dose. We also see that pattern with ACEi in heart failure and aldosterone antagonists in heart failure. This may be a clue of where to look for the cause of the survival advantage.

RALES (3 months)

CONSENSUS (first dose)

I will be adding this slide to the next version of the talk.

 

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List of therapies that reduce cardiovascular mortality in diabetes

I’m giving grand rounds on Tuesday on SGLT2 inhibitors and I’m trying to come up with a list of therapies that lower CV death in diabetes.

Here is my list:

  • Blood pressure control
    • UKPDS
    • ADVANCE All-cause mortality was reduced with a near miss on CV mortality (P=0.041)
  • Empagliflozen
  • Canagliflozin
    • CANVAS Only partial credit here. CV death was part of the composite outcome, but CVD was not significant on its own
  • Semaglutide
    • SUSTAIN-6 Weak. Hit the primary outcome but CV death was explicitly identical between groups
  • Liraglutide

Drugs that have run the FDA CV disease gauntlet and that are non-inferior to standard of care:

  • Exanatide
  • Rosiglitazone
  • Pioglitazone
  • Alogliptin
    • EXAMINE (This is a secondary prevention trial. As far as I can tell it is the only FDA mandated outcome trial that is specifically designed as a secondary prevention. Not sure why.)
  • Saxagliptin
  • Degludec

 

I’m sure I’m missing some. There must be a statin trial of diabetics. Right?

 

Swapnil was first with the statin answer:

And Edgar came up with a great visual from a review paper:

And Szymon came up with the Steno trial. I can’t believe I forgot about that one.

 

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Mistakes in medical education social media

I am in page proof hell.

The two year slog from from gleefully saying “Wow, that sounds like fun” to a published book is wrapping up. I am working with Edgar Lerma and Matt Sparks on Nephrology Secrets fourth edition. It is an amazing amount of work.

Yesterday I was proofing a chapter and found a pretty profound error.

Not a typo.

Not a misspelling.

Not an awkward turn of phrase.

This was a hardcore, error-of-fact that would have confused readers that didn’t know better and cause significant loss of authority for the book by the readers that did.

This error had travelled a long and perilous editing river to finally arrive intact at the final page proof.

I don’t know how the authors proofed their own chapter, but I assume it went through multiple drafts and rewrites. Then the chapter was sent to the editors and for Secrets, each editor read and commented on each chapter. After each editor the chapter was sent back to the authors for revision. This rinse, wash, and repeat went through three cycles. One with each editor. Then the text was turned over to Elsevier and they converted it into a book. The publisher returned proofs to the authors with specific questions that came up during the page layout. Another independent set of eyes. And then the authors signed off on the proofs.

And after all of that I found the error. A significant error.

This error came within one-step of being a permanent, written-in-ink error in the book. That chain of revisions and proofs is what makes books as good as they are. What type of checks are there in social media delivered medical education? How do we assure that the lectures and pearls we push through our blogs and tweets do not contain subtle (or not so subtle) errors. Very little social media has anywhere close to the editorial infrastructure that an Elsevier textbook enjoys.

In my post about Kidney Week I received three different DMs and @s notifying me of 3 different typos and misspelling. Fix and move on.

Typos are easy. There is more embarrassment than ego in those mistakes. Mistakes of content are harder to accept. The instinct is to defend our work, push back against the unsolicited peer reviewer. But we need to keep our ears to the crowd and our minds open so that…

If we are wrong

It is not for long.

Because the strength of social media is using Linus’s Law to uncover mistakes and then it is up to us to put away our egos and make it right.

given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow

I really feel the success of FOAMed depends on the crowd notifying authors of mistakes and then the authors fixing those mistakes. A failure on either side of that equation (either side means that if you are reading FOAMed and see a mistake you have an obligation to point it out. Noticing a mistake in medical education material and moving on without notifying the author is like seeing a discarded pistol by the playground and not telling the authorities. That dead seven-year-old is on you) and FOAMed becomes a joke as it morphs into a minefield of crappy, error filled resources.

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The Nephrology Social Media Collective internship is accepting applications

The NSMC internship was created a few years ago to assure that nephrology had a surplus of dedicated people creating varied, compelling, and creative FOAMed resources. In the early years of Social Medicine, I believed that digital natives would join #NephTwitter and quickly and effortlessly create original content without guidance.

The medical school class of 2016 began high school the same year Facebook was launched. They literally have been using social media for their entire adult life.

However after a few years I became impatient with how fast young doctors were joining #NephTwitter and wanted a way to incubate these digital natives so that they could become contributors quicker.

The Digital Native Myth is the belief that young people will intuitively understand how to contribute to FOAMed.

The 90, 9, 1 rule is that for any social media experience 90% of people just consume, 9% will comment on other people’s content, and only 1% will contribute content. The idea behind the NSMC Internship is to move as many people as possible to the right. We want to move doctors from the 90% to the 1%.

A few weeks ago in New Orleans we graduated our third class of interns.

This class was our largest yet and some of the graduates are already standouts on #NephTwitter.

The interns provide us with detailed feedback to further develop our internship. Based on that feedback we are going to be adding a new module to the curriculum to teach interns how to build a website as part of a complete social media presence. One of the roles that our graduates have repeatedly been asked to fill, is to develop a social media presence for various projects. This may be for a large study, or an institution like a division or fellowship program. Our feeling is that many programs created twitter handle and that is where they stop. In order to have a real social media presence, Twitter needs to be backed up by by a website and a blog. We are now going to teach our interns how to do that in either WordPress or SquareSpace. Additionally we will teach them how and when to use Medium.

So drop an application and join us. It will be great.