Azithromycin and the Risk of Cardiovascular Death
Question: You can structure your blog entry however you see fit, however you should include the following information:
Introduction
You should briefly describe the purpose and aims of the study you are describing. Remember your audience is GPs and pharmacists. You shouldn’t need to give long explanations of common medical conditions. Remember that the marks are awarded for your description and critical analysis of the research.
Description of methods
Think carefully about including the most important details in the methods, because you will not be able to include all the details. You should include details of the experimental protocol, but do not forgot to mention what was measured (and how) and what the primary end point of the study was (or which value was compared between groups.). As your critical analysis is largely dependent on the methods, it is important to make clear how the experiment was conducted.
Description of results
It is important to discuss the most important results quantitatively and to consider the most important information to include in a short summary. Don’t be tempted to write too much about statistical significance, without commenting on the size of the effect measured. Many papers will include lots of measurements, you need to consider which are the most important, as you won’t have room to discuss them all.
Critical analysis
This is probably the most difficult section (and consequently, where the most marks are available). Essentially, you should aim to consider the work critically, rather than simply accepting the authors’ conclusion. You can approach this task by asking questions such as: Were the methods (and endpoints) appropriate? What do the results mean? Is the authors’ interpretation of the results supported by the data?
You should try to judge each paper on its own merits. If a paper set out to test the hypothesis that ‘dogs enjoy eating bones’ it’s not really fair to criticise it for not asking whether cats like eating bones. Proposing an extension to a study (however interesting) is not critical analysis. You may wish, briefly, to discuss the implications of the research which is again interesting but is not critical analysis.
Try to keep your critical analysis specific rather than general for example, rather than automatically saying ‘the experiment would have been better if the sample size had been bigger’ consider whether this is really the case. In very may experiments it is true, but it requires some justification. Experimenters don’t usually pick a sample size (n number) out of thin air, they will perform calculations to work out the sample size they need. A trial that is bigger than it needs to be costs more money and may have ethical implications relating to unnecessary experimentation on volunteers or animals. A comment along the lines of ‘the authors don’t state how they calculated their sample size’ or ‘the authors calculated their sample size but were not able to recruit enough volunteers’ is a much more useful indication that something is wrong.
Answer
Title:- Azithromycin and the Risk of Cardiovascular Death
Reference:- Ray, W.A.et al, 2012. Azithromycin and the Risk of Cardiovascular Death. The New England Journal of Medicine 366, pp. 1881-1890.
Link:- https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1003833
Introduction
The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate the reasons of cardiac deaths that occur suddenly. The main aim of the author is to highlight that Azithromycin which is an antibacterial medicine is the main factor that induces and increase the risk related to cardiovascular deaths.
Description of Methods
In order to find out the results of the research study a statistical analysis method is implied. For such purpose Tennsse Medicaid Cohort is desined for having detection of the increasing level of risk related to death due to different situation such as medication related short term cardiac effects. In the cohort the main sample selected includes prescriptions, control periods and the patient. On this sample population statistical analysis is conducted through conducting text on a fix period. In this analysis, the cumulative incidences are calculated. In addition to this, mean and other tests are also implied to reach accurate and significant results.
Description of Results
From the data analysed with the implication of statistical analysis, a significant results has been gained. The results show that the patient who take azithromycin within 5 days of therapy have high degree of risk of cardiovascular death as compared to those patients who did not take any antibiotics. Other than this, it has also been found out that the patient who do not have intake of amoxicillin were not having any increase in the death risk for that specified period. The overall results of the research study reflect that as compared to amoxicillin, azithromycin poses an increased extent of risk of the cardiovascular death. The final research results depict that in comparison to ciprofloxacin, azithromycin has significant greater risk of cardiovascular deaths in the patients.
Critical Evaluation
The critical evaluation of the article reflects that it is a significant piece of information about the medicines that has risk of cardiovascular deaths associated with them. In order to conduct this research, the implication of statistical analysis methods proves quite significant and valid research approach by the authors. The results of the research are also quite meaningful as the authors have conducted a comparative study of the drugs on the selected patients and derived the results through practical methods. The results of the research also clearly depict the impact of each medicine on the health of the patients and probability of cardiovascular disease in patients.
The authors have clearly concluded that during the study the patients having cardiovascular disease’s risk are a dependent factor on the type of the medication taken by them. For instance with the intake of azithromycin therapy, there has been experienced a small ratio of increase in the cardiovascular death in patients. The determination of the study end point as cardiovascular death and death caused from other reasons is quite valid. The study comparisons are also made through proper adjustments of covariates with extensive sets. Overall, there are several merits of the paper, such as implication of proper methods of data collection and analysis and verified interpretations of the research results with the support of data.
Reference
Ray, W.A.et al, 2012. Azithromycin and the Risk of Cardiovascular Death. The New England Journal of Medicine 366, pp. 1881-1890.