Named medical trials garner extra attention.AVIATOR. SHOCK. AWESOME AWESOME Angina with Extremely Serious Operative Mortality Evaluation . Some medical researchers tag clinical studies with eye-grabbing acronyms to make them easier to refer to and remember. A new study suggests that an acronym acronym: see abbreviation. A word typically made up of the first letters of two or more words; for example, BASIC stands for "Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. also heightens the frequency with which other researchers cite a trial in subsequent publications. In essence, scientists have a bias toward discussing studies with short and catchy labels. The extra attention lavished on studies tagged with acronyms could encourage doctors to apply the knowledge generated by those studies, researchers at the University of Toronto Research at the University of Toronto has been responsible for the world's first electronic heart pacemaker, artificial larynx, single-lung transplant, nerve transplant, artificial pancreas, chemical laser, G-suit, the first practical electron microscope, the first cloning of T-cells, suggest in the July 6 New England Journal of Medicine The New England Journal of Medicine (New Engl J Med or NEJM) is an English-language peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. It is one of the most popular and widely-read peer-reviewed general medical journals in the world. . However, if acronyms encourage doctors to pay attention to named studies at the expense of unnamed ones, "this subtle linguistic tool could undermine evidence-based practice," Matthew B. Stanbrook and his collaborators say. For their analysis, the researchers selected 173 randomized ran·dom·ize tr.v. ran·dom·ized, ran·dom·iz·ing, ran·dom·iz·es To make random in arrangement, especially in order to control the variables in an experiment. cardiovascular cardiovascular /car·dio·vas·cu·lar/ (-vas´ku-ler) pertaining to the heart and blood vessels. car·di·o·vas·cu·lar adj. Abbr. trials published since 1953. About a third of them had been labeled with an acronym. The labeled trials were more frequently funded by pharmaceutical companies and tended to be larger and of better quality than the unlabeled studies. Taking those and other underlying differences into account, the Toronto researchers calculate that trials identified by acronyms get mentioned in the medical literature 66 percent more often than other studies do. Not surprisingly, the new study's name has an acronym: Acronym-named Randomized Trials (ART) in Medicine. |
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